Saw this post the other day: Emacs is hurting Clojure and this response: Is Emacs Really HJard to Learn / Use. This called to mind those countless discussions about tools being user friendly. I'm frequently on the unpopular side of these discussions. Linux vs Windows vs Mac, Shell vs GUI, Emacs vs fill-in-the-blank-editor-or-IDE and on and on. Don't use Emacs, it isn't user friendly. Don't use Linux, it isn't user friendly.

Quick post to add to the recent command line fu I've been writing about. Douglas Peterson had another Whatever happened to post. This time on Logo. I wanted to reply, talk about NetLogo and link to some of my old NetLogo posts to help show how cool it is. Nikola supports tags, makes a nice tags page and for each tag, a nice page of all the links. Nikola has a plugin tags which lets you manage tags from the command line.

Over in the Facebook AP Computer Science Teachers group someone asked for thoughts on covering BASH scripting as a post AP topic. A number of us made suggestions. I linked to this old blog post. One group member said she asked around for similar suggestions and the response she got was "vi and awk." I wanted to jokingly respond "and after they suggested that they got into their time machine and went back to the 70's.

Repost This is a repost from March 2015. It didn't transfer when I rebooted the blog. Original Quick post on why I love the Unix command line. We're busy organizing CSTUY's first hackathon. It's going to be at SumAll, where we hold our weekly hacking sessions but while taking registration, we had a little program. The kids signed up on a Google doc but we all know the story – when people sign up for a free event, even one with free food and t-shirts, many don't show.

Yesterday, Doug Peterson wrote a "Whatever happened to" post subtitled HTML as an essential 21st Century skill? It's a nice post. I left a comment but thought I'd elaborate here. No, knowing HTML is not programming - it's markup. Even so, when I help people design CS programs, I'll frequently recommend starting with HTML or at least introducing it early. Why? It's a gateway and not just to programming.

Quick post on why I love the Unix command line. We're busy organizing CSTUY's first hackathon. It's going to be at SumAll, where we hold our weekly hacking sessions but while taking registration, we had a little program. The kids signed up on a Google doc but we all know the story – when people sign up for a free event, even one with free food and t-shirts, many don't show.

Spreadsheets are terrific - we've all used them. I particularly like Google spreadsheets - I use them all the time to collect data, usually from students. Go to Google Drive Make a form Send the form out to the students Wait All the data gets dumped into a Google spreadsheet. The trouble is, what to do with it once it's in the spreadsheet. The other day, I wrote on a few basic stats for our upcoming SHIP program.

A few weeks ago, I noticed this Twitter conversation between Alfred Thompson and Steve Keinath I briefly considered proposing a session for the conference but it was just a day or two before the deadline, I don’t know if I’m going to be able to attend the conference, and besides, who said anything I proposed would be accepted. Still, I liked the idea - I’ve been an educator for 23 years, a Linux user for most of that time and an Unix user for longer.

I tell my students “the cool thing about what we do is that if we’re not happy with the way something works, we’ve got a shot at fixing it.” That came up this morning so I thought I’d share. I recently posted about the in-term projects my Software Development kids were working on. Well, now it’s time to grade their final projects. The code is up on GitHub. This morning I was faced with independently going to every project page and cloning each one: