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Command Line Life Partner Wanted
emj writes "Craiglist offers an interesting approach to finding a life partner , summmary: "There is a sad truth to the world today. I am part of a dying breed of people known as "shell users." ... Because there are fewer and fewer of us, I must help keep our lineage alive. I am looking for someone to help me do this. I need a woman (obviously) who is willing to raise a child with me in the method of Unix."."
Eh, it probably depends on the language/environment. People who do a lot of *NIX work probably shell a lot more than people who work more on Macs or Windows machines. (I know, the Mac gives you a bad ass command prompt, but I only know one Mac owner out of many that uses it at all.) I've worked at a pretty wide variety of companies (I'm a consultant, mostly .NET or Java work lately) and I'd say the developers that I've met that used the shell are vastly in the minority. Not to say there weren't occasional tasks that most of those developers would use a shell for when necessary or that they didn't understand the shell, but for things that could reasonably be done with either the GUI or the shell, they used the GUI.
I haven't actually seen someone debug or trace from a shell in the workplace ever, though I've certainly done it myself back in college or on personal projects since.
I'm not sure I agree that shell users are a dying breed.
Neither do I.
Over the last five years I've written just one non trivial GUI application. All my serious work is shell based. After all, who wants to waste precious clock cycles swapping out to refresh some widget?
And who-ever it was who thought tying computationally costly operations to fancy clock cycle consuming progress bars was a good idea should be shot.
Lastly, why does Vista take 45% of one CPU just to handle frequent console printfs?
http://www.spack.org/wiki/InTheBeginningWasTheCommandLine
And somebody help me find the essay about the command line vs. GUI environments, where the author rants about how inefficient GUIs are for development work. It may have been written by Larry Wall or somebody like him.
---- It won't be as bad as you fear or as good as you hope, but it will take twice as long as you plan.
I think that to some extent we are a dying breed. I'm only 23, and I'm still old enough that when I first started using a computer all we had was shell (dos, apple II). So I was forced to use CLI and am more comfortable using it as a result. My little brothers have never seen a shell...for them problems on a computer are fixed with lots and lots of clicking in the "control panel".
I'm not saying that CLI is going to fade away, because IMO it still has lots of advantages, just saying that only unix geeks will think to use it.
"I told you a million times not to exaggerate!"
Shift-Right click will bring up a shell anywhere, even on the desktop. I've been using it to install the Enthought Tool System (ETS) and it works great. I know there used to be a Powertoy that did this but I don't think it was as powerful.
I also use the prompt for burning bootable DVD's. I download Server Tools and use the dvdburn.exe utility. Shells are on their way back.
Yes training a child a birth to use a command line is no promise they will grow up using it... Especially growing up and realizing the GUI have some major advantages over command lines for Many uses....
The problem with GUIs is that they are not practical, at least not the ones that are created. I just have had to calculate about 500 Shapiro-Wilk statistics and p-values using R (statistical analysis package), I use Rkward GUI because it make things a whole lot easier, however, it would be plainly stupid to try to calculate all those values (from series with about 1000 samples) by importing, and selecting the statistics via a menu, it would have taken hours.
Instead, a simple Bash script using awk, sed, grep and a custom prgoram to run R scripts allowed me to make it automatically *and* to format the results in a way I liked.
GUIs are *easy* to use, but they are very impractical. It would be a nice argument to prove if all of them are like that or if it is only that GUIs are usually made that way (i.e., the irfanView batch converting is really good! and easy compared to some linux command line equivalents... and there is no Linux GUI equivalent of that).
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
to agree to allow me to teach them binary math first.. I wanted to teach them how to count to 1023 on their fingers (4, 128, and 132 are a scream)
I gotta lotta hell no.. but imagine it-- if your kids intuitively knew binary-- or hex-- imagine the abilitys for a future programmer..
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
its already been done, just take the video and play back with aalib or libcaca in mplayer!
And in case you were wondering, yes, it's authentic.