http://u2d.com/articles/2006/03/01/milestone-maias-first-email en-us 40 <p>I mark a milestone today: my six year old daughter Maia wrote me her first email message. So far she's using webmail. I think she's ready to step up to Evolution.</p> <p>I need to do some thinking before introducing the next thing. I was thinking the shell is something everyone should know. But I'm increasingly convinced that our current situation of heterogeneous everything is kind of crazy. I want a homogeneous everything. Like my good friend Sam says: <em>I have a lisp machine.</em></p> <p>We have one language for talking to the computer in the shell. Yet we have another language for talking to the computer when we write programs. I don't want to be in a situation where today I tell her: this is how you get a directory listing: <code>ls</code>. And tomorrow I'll say: I lied, the way to do it in ruby is <code>Dir.entries("/home/maia")</code>..</p> <p>Anyhow it wouldn't hurt for her to know the shell.</p> Wed, 01 Mar 2006 08:33:00 -0600 urn:uuid:6ab2fc9202ef9dcfd4b3358ad0de53ae Eitan http://u2d.com/articles/2006/03/01/milestone-maias-first-email Computers