> Tell me which 10 year olds today know CLI? They're all plastered to their iPads.

Prime example of juvenoia and biased stereotypical thinking right there. "Back in my days ..." ™

I know more kids in the ages up to 13 who are interested in actually exploring and working with technical stuff (programming and electronics for example) than kids who spend their most time just "consuming" and using these things. The main reason is that these things are much more accessible these days. YMMV, depending on your social and demographic environment I guess ...

Since I don't have concrete data to back it up, I usually view it as a case of every generation had children and youth who were interested in exploring technology and those who were simply interested in using it. While there is probably some shift in numbers, I doubt that it is a big shift.

Granted, I also set the bar relatively high. (Example: are those skills transferable.)

Some know the /command interface to Minecraft.

My child is in awe when he sees me use the Minecraft CLI. He was excited to start kindergarten specifically to learn to read and write enough to use the CLI. I'm hoping that will eventually be his entree into programming.

It does give me some hope that future generations will still use computers and not just tablets.

Language is kind of the way we have serialized our thoughts for communication and storage. CLI is probably the simplest way to implement that in a computer, but you could probably go quite far by providing a TTS/STT interface to a CLI.

I'm not saying that's what you should do with Minecraft, but it could be interesting to see how such an interface is usable.

Minecraft has taught our kids to write just for the search item interface. I just draw pictures with the words underneath for their favourites items and they copy them. A great carrot :)

KIDS TODAY AMIRITE???