It's not just concrete things like command line or linux or old crusty editors, it's about how they lack general computer savvy and flexible problem solving skills.

One example:

I had this guy, it was his second job, the previous one was about some Enterprise Java thing. Intelligent and hard working, and able to learn: we were exploring Erlang for some parts of the system and he was contributing within the month, with just a bit of hand-holding. But one day we get an urgent request for new functionality in the Java parts of the org, so I hand it to him. First task is getting some static data out of a few dusty html tables deep in the intranet and dumping it on a new table in the dev DB so we can start prototyping around it.

A couple of hours go past and I go check up on him. He's deep into some docs for an XML parser and ORM so he can parse the tables and get the data into the DB. He has already like 5 or 6 classes with all their getters and setters but he's not nearly halfway done.

I bring up the browser console, type $ to see if jQuery is loaded in the page, then come up with a one liner that spits the insert statements on the console (I had to google a couple of times, I'm not really a jQuery dude).

But then even that was a bit too flashy... he could just have coaxed the data into the database fiddling around with a spreadsheet and the DB GUI for a couple minutes.

But somehow his default and almost only mental model of interaction with data was overengineered Java, no matter how overkill it was for the task.

I guess it's just different workflows and preferences. I like Vim and the commandline because they don't get in my way and don't try to be clever. I don't get 3 popups every time I open a program because there's a new update available and it really wants me to create an account and it has a super important "tip of the day" I forgot to turn off. Instead I can give it a couple thousand lines from a source it doesn't need to know about and let it chew on the data and write it into a file to load in a Python script. And somehow it still all stays up to date without having to tell me.

GUIs are nice to get into but are also limiting because they were designed with assumptions about how I use the program. Compared to the commandline they feel like they have a wall built around them that prevents me from making them interact with the rest of the system. Some GUIs are less limiting but in turn not any more beginner-friendly than the commandline.

I don’t think compiling kernels would really gain anything from being outside a terminal?

Ultimately it’s just an interface to programs that output mostly text. It took me a really long time to wrap my head around that. Programs that have a GUI and programs that run in the terminal use the same building blocks.