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Comment by radida | Hacker News Reader

No it shouldn't, and honestly neither should programming. Sometimes I swear we can get so drunk on our own farts that we think engineering is the only valuable profession in the world, when in reality not everyone needs to be able to code a rails app if all they want to do is check their Facebook. There are many other jobs that are important and valuable to society that do not involve CS - lets just put down the kook-aid.

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If a person does not understand how the world around them works (and most of it is driven by computers), how can we expect them to adequately operate in it?

A couple weeks back I remember the case when someone bleached her home because she feared she could catch the viruses on her computer. There are many people who do, for the lack of a better word, rituals with their computers because they can't figure out their wi-fi radio tales some time to grab the local network signal. They do it because they did it once and it worked and they have no idea it had nothing to do with the problem they were trying to solve.

A basic understanding of technology is increasingly important.

So Linux is somehow immune against people ritualising how they interact with a computer? They will have a problem one day, google for a solution and remember that solution. Few will actively try understanding the solution and how and why it works.

Operating systems don't have magical powers for making users interested in their internals.

It's not immune, but chances are that, during the time you are googling solutions for your problem, you'll have to learn something about how computers actually work. If the solution points you to a series of "click here, then here" screens, you won't get any useful insights on how it's done under the hood because you spent the whole time above it.

Suggestions to solve a problem on Linux often are written on a similar level, it's just that »click here, then here« gets replaced by »edit this part of that config file and then run this series of arcane invocations«. Oftentimes you can just copy/paste from some forum and won't learn anything from it.

And when you edit a config file you are forbidden to look at any part of it except the one you are editing, right?

Bullshit. Most people doesn't know a shit about electronics and they are surrounded with electronic equipment. And this is an example, there are a lot of things I don't know almost anything about them and I can successfully operate with them.

For the values of successful you are accustomed to, that is.

How many people die every year for not understanding the basics of electricity?

I believe almost everybody know that electricity can kill you and this is taught at school.

Evidently if you try to repair your TV (without knowing how to repair it), change the electrical installation of your house (without knowing anything), touching a high intensity cable or something like that it is a dead by accident or by stupidity.

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