2018-07-16 11:28 EDT, Purwanto, Wirawan <[email protected]>: > I am new to Carpentry community so please bear with me if this is a stupid > question, or not related to Carpentry. I have been facilitating people on > my campus to use HPC and research computing resources in general. One thing > I see with many folks learning new computing stuff is that they are lazy at > typing even simple commands. Instead, they rely on cut and paste operation. > I believe there is something done on your brain if you actually type or > write things down, instead of merely staring at words and do “passive” > copy-and-paste operation. I still intentionally type commands (even if they > are somewhat long) just to get it written on my brain. Anyone having > similar observation? If so, how will you encourage them to be “active” in > typing rather than just do the most convenient thing?
I (software engineer) never really use copy and pasting, and I understand why it's surprising to see people whose work don't revolve as much around the command-line rely on it. However I rely a lot on the history features of the shell, e.g. up-arrow/ctrl+R, so I wouldn't be so quick calling this 'wrong' or filing it under 'avoiding the cognitive burden'. <http://www.commitstrip.com/en/2017/02/28/definitely-not-lazy/> I personally think that having a code book of often used commands is good for reproducibility and onboarding, better than a history of commands in one account's history or relying on one person's expertise in a lab of non-coders. Something else I would do is write a shell script for any operation complex enough (and check that into version control). This is definitely best for reproducibility (easier to update/maintain, can perform additional checks, can be commented). Maybe the problem is that writing scripts and the history features are seldom taught in an introduction to the shell? Definitely gave me something to think about. Cheers -- Rémi ------------------------------------------ The Carpentries: discuss Permalink: https://carpentries.topicbox.com/groups/discuss/Taf27bc5ac21f2829-M631dff230c8557f3fb30a11e Delivery options: https://carpentries.topicbox.com/groups
