Completely agree. I got a commodore 64 and a 286 when I was 6. My dad taught me how to start my games in DOS so I could start those up by myself when I woke up early in the morning and they slept in. I started working through the BASIC manual that came with my C64 when I was 7 and if/then/else were some of my first English words that I learned. No need to dumb it down too much, kids will figure it out.

1) This shell is not required to play games, so that motivation is not relevant to this discussion. 2) survivorship bias.

I think starting with something approachable like Scratch then advancing on to a posix shell in Ubuntu is a great idea, but I take issue with the attitude that if a child is scared by a shell they should not learn to program.

Sure, I agree with both 1) and 2) -- I just don't see how "being scared of a shell" is a valid point. If the kid is given the thing and told to go wild, I doubt most kids would be "scared". Adults, maybe. But not kids.

Anyway, the kid doesn't have to know that the shell isn't prerequisite to play games -- until they figure it out on their own. My point was more that children are adept at overcoming obstacles that stand in the way of play.

> My point was more that children are adept at overcoming obstacles that stand in the way of play.

I agree with that point entirely, but that does not mean that all children will overcome all challenges. My point is that we should not give up on a child just because they struggle with a shell. The reason I think shells are not the best introduction is that they cannot be figured out by exploration. They require specific knowledge that cannot be deduced because it is fundamentally arbitrary. That information can still be found online, so it is not impossible to discover, but I think it is ridiculous to give up on a 7 year old because they did not like exploring a shell.