If you want to be a programmer, you know the command line so that when the guy interviewing you for a job asks you how you’d remove all phone numbers from the bodies of 50 000 HTML files, you will say “use sed” instead of starting to sketch a 500 line C program that does directory traversal, input buffering and token lexing.
The command line isn’t just a different command interface, it’s an actual programming environment in itself, which the modern GUIs never are.
I’m not going for comp sci jobs, I’m going for finance. Programming is a secondary skill, more used for Excel macros than general-purpose tasks. And virtually nobody uses Linux environments.
Going for a field where Linux isn’t used is a pretty good reason not to bother with it. You can cover the regexp/scripting-fu the linked article is talking about pretty well by just being handy with Perl or Python instead.
If you want to be a programmer, you know the command line so that when the guy interviewing you for a job asks you how you’d remove all phone numbers from the bodies of 50 000 HTML files, you will say “use sed” instead of starting to sketch a 500 line C program that does directory traversal, input buffering and token lexing.
The command line isn’t just a different command interface, it’s an actual programming environment in itself, which the modern GUIs never are.
I’m not going for comp sci jobs, I’m going for finance. Programming is a secondary skill, more used for Excel macros than general-purpose tasks. And virtually nobody uses Linux environments.
Going for a field where Linux isn’t used is a pretty good reason not to bother with it. You can cover the regexp/scripting-fu the linked article is talking about pretty well by just being handy with Perl or Python instead.