Slashdot Mirror
In The Beginning Was The Command Line, Updated
Unqualified code-monkey Garote submits his annotated version of Neal Stephenson's In The Beginning Was The Command Line, updated to discuss UI design theory and fill in some of the gaps from the last five years. (And yes, he has been granted permission from Neal to do this.) There's plenty more to cover of course: Will the command-line last only as long as the keyboard? How will desktop search technology change our workflow? What about the 3D interface? Scroll to any random paragraph in the essay and you'll find something worth expounding on. What's ahead for the next five years?
I thought in the beginning was the "punch card".
Talk about a bad UI!
"Leo Fender was in a 'state of grace' when he designed the Stratocaster." -- Paul Reed Smith
"I was raised on the command line, bitch"
there's no place like ~
What is this GUI thing you speak of, you young whippersnapper? I'll use a command line 'til my dying day, pounding the keys with my cane if I have to.
What's ahead for the next five years?
Hopefully, some higher power will pick an OSS desktop, create some interface and application standards and we can all start dumping Windows. Until then, my Linux migration ends at the point where I have to pick gnome or KDE (or even something else).
Which one should I pick and why?
More
Keyboard ain't going anywhere. Expect it to exist for as long as there are words to type.
"Evolution optimized homo sapiens for wandering the savannah - moving around a plane - and not swinging through the trees. Today this evolutionary bias shows in comparing the number of people who drive a car versus the number of helicopter pilots: 2D navigation (on the ground) vs. 3D navigation (in the air)."
What absolute, total, bollocks. Cost of helicopters vs cost of cars has not figured into this tit's thoughts, then?
I read this book when it first came out and I have to say that I was quite disappointed.
His insistance that Windows doesn't have a command line shows a deliberate distortion of the truth to try to make his point.
Any REAL Windows Admin knows this is false and it's a prime way to identify an Anti-MS zealot.
Anyway, it hasn't stopped me being a fan of NS, but it did disappoint me in a big way.
Goofy, Geeky Gifts and More!
People use the command line nowadays to control servers by SMS. Spoken commands, as well, are likely to follow a command-line type interface. Just uttering "Tea, earl grey, hot" in expert-mode is a lot less infuriating then "press 1 for tea, press 2 for coffee, press 4 for chocolate milk, press 5 for cola, press 6 for beer" -- (6) "Press 1 for lager press 2 for stout press 3 for ale" (1) "press 1 for hot press 2 for cold" (2) "Press 1 for alcohol free press 2 for alcohol-rich" (2) "Press 1 for carbonated 2 for cat-pee" (and so on)
Visit http://ringbreak.dnd.utwente.nl/~mrjb/growingbettersoftware to download your free copy of the book
The current state of the human interface to computers works well because there is an extremely limited number of commands a computer (or computer program) understands. As computer sophistication improves and functions increase in complexity, the "point and click" interface will become too cumbersome. It is inevitable that the typical user interface will evolve toward the same one used between humans for everyday interaction, e.g. the spoken word.
IMHO
There are many ways to predict the future, I personally think the monitors will be everywhere, from our flat's walls to our clothes' sleeves.
It'll still be flat (2D) and people should now realize that what counts is the input.
For years, we only had one focus at a time and this should change, thus allowing drastical changes (imagine if several networkedusers have a focus on an app at the same time... impossible ? who remembers the Acorn "Spheres of chaos" where 4 users could play on the same machine at the same time ?).
So, I'd go for a more practical approach to a 2D interface (I was thinking of some itnerface that would ban both scrollbars and overlapping windows by magnifying the active zone of each focussed elements while reducing the others thus making these still visible, ergo invokable)...
Trolling using another account since 2005.
When seeing an article like this going on about command line histories and 3D desktops, it's interesting that a major new feature in Microsoft Longhorn will be the completely new shell code-named Monad. Hm. Better late than never, I guess. I wonder why they see a need for it though; aren't they trying to move away from a command line? Maybe it's an attempt to get back users having switched from Windows. Who knows, but that sounds a bit strange too, since it won't be very compatible with a *nix shell either. :-/
IMHO, it's one of the strangest and most surprising moves in Longhorn.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
I studied English lit and ancient Greek in college. I gained the best understanding of grammar, syntax and sentence structure from Greek. Breaking down those huge words, looking at a language from scratch -- it has helped me the most in English. It's tough now to not see Greek in English words. I view prepositional purposes from the Greek model and all parts of speech came into light through Greek (queue the "it's all Greek to me" jokes).
When it comes to computing, I started out at the command line. True computing, to me, IS the command line, and I gained the most understanding of computers from it. I prefer to use Linux that way (I don't load a GUI). "Windows is a good terminal" is how I think Richie put it, and although the GUI is here and necessary, real computing will always be from the command line. I will admit Lynx never replaced a GUI web browser for me, but someone who really knows the command line (and therefore the OS) can run circles around the mousey admins....
"All great things are simple & expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope." --Churchill
"The only good thing about windows is I can run multiple sessions of DOS."
Three digits were turning to zero for God's sake! We're lucky to escape with our lives. Remember what happened to people in the year 1000? Of course not - because they did not adjust their computer code to handle Y1K and they all perished.
Let's face it, without OS/2 there never would have been a Windows 95. Rising competition from OS/2 caused Microsoft to release a very cut down version of Cairo, and step up it's anti-competitive strong arming of IHVs and ISVs. Competition from Linux is the only reason stability has increased in Windows, and is driving MS to address security issues. Apple still has very little competitive influence, since it doesn't look to expand much outside of it's niche market. OS X was surgery to stop the bleeding, not a grab at extra marketshare.
I can understand the hype about searching for things on other folks' computers (such as on the internet) because I don't have a priori knowledge about where to find some information.
When I store things on my computer, however, I already (at some point) know where that bit of information is. I created my own "filing system" optimized for the way I think. You might say it's some sort of O(1) function to find something (now, navigating to that something might be a little more difficult). The human brain is way better about managing the location of objects than a computer (so far) in terms of retrieval.
Think about it: the word "search" connotes looking for something you either think or know exists somewhere, but you don't know where. If you know where something is, you don't search for it but just go and grab it.
Now, of course there are times when you haven't used something in so long that you might not remember where it is, and I can see how a search might come in handy for that. But if most people use computers like I use them, they use a small subset of the things on their computer very frequently, and the rest is archived away. I would have to say that less than 5% (that's a 95% confidence interval - it's probably way less than that) of my total computing experience (on my desktop) is spent on trying to find stuff.
Does anyone out there know how "desktop search" is supposed to improve the way I do work when most of the time I am either creating new data (programs, documents, etc.) for a specific purpose or playing games? Am I missing something about the power of "searching" in general?
"There are a dozen opinions on a matter until you know the truth. Then there is only one." - CS Lewis (paraprhase)
as a former windows power user who transitioned completely only about a year ago, let me offer this advice:
Pick up an ubuntu cd, give it a partition, and use it more than the two minutes it takes to conclude it's not windows.
Seriously. Forget windows is even there for a week. Pretend someone stole your old computer and all they left you with is this weird piece of shit doppelganger that sorta looks like your old pc, but everything's just a little "off."
Accept the fact transitions are not always easy, and give this doppelganger a week of your computing life. Then go back to windows.
And make sure you have some clean clothes handy, because you're going to need a shower afterward.
I'm a die hard command line user, yes. I have no delusions about it always being better than a GUI--I use both--but I do a significant amount of work from the command line.
What's peculiar to me is how crusty and stale most command line environments have become. Most UNIX users swear by bash, which isn't even as nice as 4NT for Windows. Feels like there's a lot of room for improvement here. For example, how about capturing all of the output per command, then quickly allowing you to scroll through a list of previous commands and jump to its output? Or getting away from overly static command line windows and instead having something like a simple text editor, where you can move around in a "document" and press Enter at any time, with the output always appearing below it (some language interpreters work like this). And shell scripting languages are irrelevant these days, so a shell doesn't need to be bulked up with such commands. Just use Perl or Python (or whatever) for that sort of thing.
Note again, I'm not trashing the command line. I'd simply like to see it move forward.
In the beginning there were a bank of switches.
AND WE LIKED IT LIKE THAT.
If you couldn't be bothered to translate the error codes from hex and look them up in the manual, who needed ya?
Now scram. It's grandpa's naptime.
"First you get the Linux, then you get the power, THEN you get the women"
"If Jakob Nielson's useit.com is ever linked to again on Slashdot, I will add "127.0.0.1 slashdot.org" to /etc/hosts"
;)
3 lines below, AC cuts off the very branch he sits on:
"The UseIt article is 6 years old. The advances in 3D desktops, screen resolutions and HCI devices have improved since then. Link value = 0 --Blade-Melbourne"
Good riddance
The marginalia referred to in this thread don't amount to much; they lack continuity with the article, and come across as the querulous interjections of an adolescent schoolboy. The commentator has a number of valid points (which I don't dispute), but he has a long way to go before he approaches Stephenson's calibre as a writer.
Bottom line: if anybody is going to "revisit" the article, my preference would be for the original author to do so.
I find that I can do some things more efficiently on the command line while others are much easier with a gui.
For instance, I have a directory, and I need to copy 10 out of a 100 files. There's no commonality between the ten nor are there any distinguishing characteristics. GUI's excel at this.
Now I want to rename a bunch of files and add a old. prefix to them. That's easy on a command line, but difficult to accomplish on the current crop of GUI's, at least that I've used.
So why slam either. Each is a tool with its own advantages and disadvantages.
Keyboard isn't going away until something more efficient comes along. Sure there will be cooler input devices and they'll have strengths, but for general input into a computer nothing beat a keyboard out side of direct neural interface. It would be nice to see more efficient keyboards become mainstream.
-- fiewl diwor dowe wutie er godist phudo
OK I had to try this. Here is the random paragraph:
"The Microsoft Gorilla, on the other hand, cannot be trained. Instead, you must keep rephrasing your directions until the MS Gorilla can comprehend them. He consumes both front seats, lowering the mileage of your car, and blocking most of your view. Though he sounds like a bad deal, MS Gorilla is actually extremely popular, because he looks impressive, drives aggressively, and keeps his mouth shut. If you speak in his limited vocabulary, he will take you Where You Want To Go Today ... especially if he can plow monkeys off the intervening road. However, if you touch anything on the dashboard, or try to haggle with him over the exact route, he may become irritated and casually drive your car into a telephone pole. People learn to not argue."
WOW! What a great image. It does a great job of describing Microsoft's OS too. In fact that is why I don't care for Microsoft. I like to fiddle with the dashboard. I'm always changing the radio station or adjusting the temperature.
Insert Generic Sig Here: