On Fri, May 29, 2015 at 12:11:34PM +1000, Timothy Rice wrote: > I'm not a fan of trying to "sell" why someone should learn > something.
This is not a black and white decision. Some theatrics and motivational pitching are certainly useful in sharing our enthusiasm for these topics. There are certainly some folks that you won't reach with a quick sketch of how these tools fit into our workflow, and that's just the way it is. But if you just dive into the nuts and bolts without at least sketching out the big picture, learners won't have a framework to hook the new ideas onto and it will just be a jumbled data dump. So I'm in favor of opening up with a “we're learning the shell now, because (a) it lets you automate all that tediously repetitive analysis and (b) it lets you easily integrate awesome tools like Git, your text editor, LaTeX, other folks' analysis tools, …” with a little teaser example from your own experience or the goostat example from shell-novice. Of course, with too large an intro demo this becomes a lecture, so it's important to get through the “look at the cool things you can do in the shell!” phase quickly and move on to “ok, lets actually show you how to do this yourself”. Cheers, Trevor -- This email may be signed or encrypted with GnuPG (http://www.gnupg.org). For more information, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pretty_Good_Privacy
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