So compared to plain bash without autocomplete and Ctrl+R it may be useful. It is probably a step back for everyone else.

I think it could be much worse than even a plain shell with ^R, as the llm will be slower than the normal history search and probably has less context than the $HISTFILE.

One alternative are monadic types like result or maybe, that can contain either a value or an error/no value.

I recently spent some time optimizing a small Julia program I wrote that generates a lookup table of brainfuck constants. Because it only needs to run once, I originally didn’t care about performance when I originally wrote it (and the optimization was mostly for fun).

I achieved an ~100x improvement by adding types, using static arrays and memoization. In the end, the performance was mostly limited by primitive math operations, I tried using multiple threads, but any synchronization destroyed the performance.

However, the most impressive thing was the ability of Julia to scale from dynamically typed scripting language to almost a compiled language with minimal changes to the code.

Having the commands listed at the bottom by default is one thing i personally dislike about nano, because they take up space while being useless to someone knowing the commands (or at least knowing how to open the help in, which is what you can do in vim to achieve the cheat sheet). The alternative that vim uses, is to show the commands when starting the editor without opening a file.

afaik yes, at least the arch kernel has selinux enabled, but you need to install the user space tools from the AUR.

I agree that having some glyphs in color can be bad, for example when you are typesetting a formula in TeX that contains emoji, the color looks just unprofessional. As a solution, let me introduce you to the Noto Emoji font: https://fonts.google.com/noto/specimen/Noto+Emoji

I don’t really have a single favorite a language, if I am able to choose freely it depends on the task.

• C++ for natively compiled programs and C interoperability, I like the types from the STL and templates.
• Clojure is IMO great for data-oriented programs, I really like the immutability and it being a lisp. The java interop and the ability to compile to JavaScript with clojurescript can also be useful.
• Julia for smaller (mostly numerical) programs that should be fast at runtime. The type system is great in being optional, but strong and significantly improving performance when types annotations are used.
• Fennel (or Lua) is definitely my favorite Language for embedding into larger programs and scripting. Fennel has the advantage of being a lisp and cleanly compiling to lua.
• brainf*ck is great as a simple language to have fun and enjoy programming

These shortcuts aren’t provided by the terminal or the shell but the readline library (or zle if you use zsh), which can be configured using the ~/.inputrc file.

Easyeffects is great, or use the eq built in to pipewire to avoid an additional dependency: wiki.archlinux.org/title/PipeWire#Systemwide_parametric_equalization

RAID 5/6 is somewhat broken, and some people might consider the lack of built in encryption or support for a cache disk as problems. For some reason it seems popular to blame it for data loss.

That being said, it is my favorite file system and I never had problems with data loss, but I use ECC RAM on my desktop as is strongly recommended if you use btrfs or zfs (another potential downside).

I don’t know of one, but why not install gnome on Mint (or Debian)?

I exclusively use podman instead of docker at work and at home and haven’t encountered any unsolvable problems.

I genuinely don’t know if scratch is the right choice or a simple text based language would be better, especially for the older kids. Just from my personal experience, I started programming in BASIC at 12 and don’t think I would have had as much fun and continued programming if i had used scratch instead.

You don’t even need to look at the extension to identify most file formats, as there are unique magic numbers stored at the beginning of most (binary) formats. Only when a single binary format is reused to appear as two different formats to the user, e.g. zip and cbz are extensions relevant. This is how the file command and most (?) Linux file explorers identify files, and why file extensions are traditionally largely irrelevant on Linux/Unix.

This means your idea of suggesting software based on the file type is even more practicable than you described.

Keeping the details about vim in the extras is what I would do as well, but I would definitely tell the students that vim and vi exist, because they are the only editors available on many systems.

I would consider that ifconfig is deprecated on many distros and would therefore teach about iproute2 (mostly the ip and ss commands) instead. Additionally I would consider editing files essential, even if it is with nano.

Maybe mention more modern and simpler help tools like tldr, as they could be even more useful to beginners.

To introduce the shell and utilities, I would try to find a somewhat realistic use case that combines multiple aspects, like analyzing some files or spellchecking instead of simply mentioning every feature one by one.

Thanks, i hadn’t heard oft Factor before, it looks interesting. I’m more of a LISP and FP Person but always wanted to properly learn a stack based language, Factor seems like a nice alternative to Forth for that purpose.

I find that S-expressions are the best syntax for programming languages. And in general infix operators are inferior to either prefix or postfix notation.

Why not write your own version? Getting the temperatures is easy and portable with the sensors command from lm-sensors. The rest of the info is easy to get using various commands (e.g. uptime, free) combined with a bit of sed/grep/awk for formatting.

If you are looking for cheap storage, i recommend you check out diskprices.com . At least it helped me sometimes to find the disk with a low price per TB.