Having read the article I half-agree with the author. Yes, learning arcane and inconsistent APIs is not the work the students signed up for and studying command-line tools doesn't materially help them in the near-term.
However, the things that make the command-line so difficult also make it easy to package tools together underneath simpler apis. I suspect the students are struggling with having to use tools that aren't supported by their department or industry community. Otherwise they'd have a shared script that they all maintain that turns a bare PC/Mac/*nix box into one that's capable of doing great work.
This happens with every single engineering team. Those who understand the tools wrap them up into something solid so new folks have a great experience on their first day.
I second the interest in a blog post. Jennifer, it's rare that someone develops an art background before programming so I'd love to hear your thoughts on the similarities and differences.
In practice the tool doesn't have any blame feel to it. When I commit code that causes problems Squash correctly identifies me and lets me know what to fix. And when I was mistakenly chosen I'm still a good candidate for triaging the bug and sending it off to the appropriate developer.
It currently has clients for Java, Objective-C, Ruby and Javascript. So it most likely supports any application you're working on as long as that application has a git repository. Feel free to contribute a Python client.
His point is 100% right, but his argument is inappropriate for wide distribution. He's not sharing the results of a scientific study, he's not sharing a personal growthful experience, he's stating his perspective and inviting others to agree with him.
It's persuasive but that's because I already agree with him. I'd like to see it backed with real data so it could be persuasive to all. Then it would be more of an "idea worth spreading" rather than "a really good idea".
They suspended the account, they didn't cancel it. On a Sunday morning when you're fixing a security hole and you know who penetrated it you suspend that person's account. On Monday morning you figure out what to do with them.
We're using both Ember and Backbone here at Square. Backbone has proven useful for small apps (https://squareup.com/retail) while Ember is an effective replacement for Rails when it's backed by a good JSON api.
I agree that the poster may not have intended to exclude women, but when they imagined that work environment in their head I'll bet they weren't imagining it full of women writing code.