This is so true. I grew up in the GUI era and while I knew how to wonk the control panel better than my parents, the CLI was a black box for me for a long time. I couldn't even fathom how you could just write up some text into a file and that becomes a video game. It's probably so much worse if you've been handed an ipad or a chromebook and that's all you know. You don't even have access to the actual file system.

These days though, the bar has been lowered dramatically. I work with some high schoolers for some research projects occassionally. This one kid must have been raised on ipads and chrome books. The goal was to copy the text output of some software connected to the instrument, paste it into a text document on notepad, and save the file. The kid looked at me like I was speaking french. I had to teach him how to copy and paste with a mouse, and teach him what a text file was.

Are kids taught computer classes anymore or touch typing, like I was? Or are they just handed their school issued chromebook or ipad and its assumed they know how to open the browser to g suite?

All these layers of abstraction make it hard to actually understand whats going on. It's like we've flipped the learning curve from being really hard at the start then easier (like learning CLI tools and programming then it "clicks" when you realize the syntax is similar across most languages and you can pick up anything easily), to really easy at the start and impossible to understand later because we abstracted away what actually happens.