First-- hyperbole. Spending an hour with your dad tinkering with a terminal prompt is hardly the same as preparing for and entering a beauty pageant.
My 8 year old doesn't sit at the terminal, but he sure likes going to Scratch and editing the computer games there... sometimes writing his own, but usually just finding amusing ways to cheat or make existing games do weird things.
I wish it was a little easier to get into the "under the hood" stuff for kids. A whole lot of kids can do it and would enjoy it, but there's too many things with shallower learning curves in computers competing for attention.
As far as "tender cognitive age"--- not everyone picks up the mental models and procedural thinking needed to be a decent programmer. A little bit of early exposure probably makes this more likely. Of course, too much of anything is bad.
> the title of this article, that I commented on, is literally "How many Linux commands can a 7 year old learn?"
Did you just willfully skip everything I said to focus on this?
The article is about a kid who spent an hour, once, with his dad experimenting with a terminal. He's interested and curious and probably wants to do it again.
I told you that my 8 year old doesn't sit at a terminal, but has spent a fair bit more than an hour doing a somewhat similar computing task. He's also hyper-social and well adapted dealing with other living beings.
My 8 year old doesn't sit at the terminal, but he sure likes going to Scratch and editing the computer games there... sometimes writing his own, but usually just finding amusing ways to cheat or make existing games do weird things.
I wish it was a little easier to get into the "under the hood" stuff for kids. A whole lot of kids can do it and would enjoy it, but there's too many things with shallower learning curves in computers competing for attention.
As far as "tender cognitive age"--- not everyone picks up the mental models and procedural thinking needed to be a decent programmer. A little bit of early exposure probably makes this more likely. Of course, too much of anything is bad.