I like using the Pixar incident when working with students who are programming at the command-line for the first time, as an illustration of how powerful the command-line is (or rather, how much modern systems wrap things in safety layers). The disaster that befell the web-hosting guy was not just one line of code, but other errors and bugs (variables not being set) and overall badly designed systems for automation.
But this Pixar incident, if it happened the way described, is the result of someone with total control and agency who typed in that one line of code and ran it. And they did it to something that is immediately tangible (and beloved) to the average non-programmer. If a professional at Pixar could do something so tragically destructive to something like Toy Story...imagine what you [the novice] could accidentally do.
(thus, please remember to use Tab as much as possible to autocomplete)
I was surprised not to see this mentioned in the front page discussion about the guy who supposedly rm rf'ed his web hosting service [1]
The (amusing and animated) YouTube video link has since been changed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8dhp_20j0Ys
I like using the Pixar incident when working with students who are programming at the command-line for the first time, as an illustration of how powerful the command-line is (or rather, how much modern systems wrap things in safety layers). The disaster that befell the web-hosting guy was not just one line of code, but other errors and bugs (variables not being set) and overall badly designed systems for automation.
But this Pixar incident, if it happened the way described, is the result of someone with total control and agency who typed in that one line of code and ran it. And they did it to something that is immediately tangible (and beloved) to the average non-programmer. If a professional at Pixar could do something so tragically destructive to something like Toy Story...imagine what you [the novice] could accidentally do.
(thus, please remember to use Tab as much as possible to autocomplete)
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11496947