The Case Against GUIs, Revisited

snydeq writes "Deep End's Paul Venezia advocates the importance of the command line, in light of the increasing use of GUIs in today's technologies, as well as the increasing perception among admins that proponents of the CLI are dragging computing back to the 'dark ages of the C:\ prompt."

Comments

This, perhaps...

[troff]

... speaks more of the admins who assume that "CLI" == "C:\ prompt".
Or the idiots who think "CLI" == "the GUI in front of me is therefore made unusable". The people at "GUI Industries" can't make a link or shortcut to the appropriate script?

Why would you trust an admin who can't, as TFA indicates, edit a text file?

Re:This, perhaps...

[19thNervousBreakdown]

Why would you trust an admin who can't, as TFA indicates, edit a text file?

Or write a safe regex:

$ echo '123a123b123c123' | sed 's/123.123.123./321.321.321./g'
321.321.321.123

Gotta love the way he hand-waved the "half hour on a Wednesday" to do the whole transition, too. As someone who's done it, it is never, ever, ever that simple. Have fun finding bugs like the above, fixing them, finding out that your fix invalidates your entire solution, approaching it from a different angle, looking up an obscure syntax you can't remember even though you use sed/awk/grep every day, finding out you've got a slightly older version or yours wasn't compiled with --enable-double-buttgrep ... sure, the "30 minutes" sounds great when you're trying to make a point, but it also sounds ridiculous to anyone who's actually done it twice.

I love me some CLI, and I'd lose my mind if I didn't have it available, but promoting either one to the exclusion of the other is asanine.

Re:This, perhaps...

[sarysa]

It seems that the one thing that bash-fu black belts and complete novices have in common is that they don't realize both can be used in parallel...

Talk to your computer?

[MrEricSir]

I'm afraid I can't let you do that, Dave.

Dark ages of the C:\ prompt

[Sir Realist]

Anyone who thinks that a command line prompt starts with a 'C:\' has no idea what they're talking about.

Why not both?

[Kenshin]

Why does this always have to degenerate into a Campbell's Chunky Soup "Fork or Spoon" debate? Why not just use the most appropriate interface for the task at hand?

A GUI can be shit for some things, and (unless you live and breathe CLI) a CLI can be too complex and unwieldy for other things.

Re:First post

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

I like my CLI smartphone. With wget and Perl5, I don't need any of those useless, cluttery widgets for connecting GPS to reviews of local restaurants - and dialling is a breeze, as I grep through the flatfile of contacts I have acumulated by rsyncing from my desktop dump of the company LDAP.

Re:First post

[Anonymous Coward]

At last, I've found another n900 user! Brilliant phone.

Re:First post

[msauve]

"By your own admission you've devoted half a lifetime or more to developing computer skills. Should everybody have to do that? Are people who don't devote half a lifetime specifically to computing skills "stupid' and "fearful"?"

Yes, and yes, if their career is administering computers (or computer networks, which is what the article is about).

Re:Raises hand

[lennier]

If a human is required, it's editing.

That's your opinion. I think the point the original poster is making (certainly the point I'd make) is that our interfaces should be agnostic as to whether a human or a decision-making algorithm is driving them.

Because otherwise, how are we going to take control of our workflow and delegate the automatable parts of it to automation, if the interfaces we use stubbornly insist that 'no, a human must be in the loop to do that!'

This attitude, which sadly is rife among GUI designers, is keeping us stuck in the dark ages. It fundamentally shouldn't matter if a human or a program is doin any job on your desktop. End of story. It's not the interface's job to decide. If a script can take a look at a JPEG, apply a beauty algorithm and decide to fudge the colour contrast and recrop - and if a human can look at that afterwards and decide that it's good and keep it - well, then that's editing, isn't it? But it's done by a partnership of human and machine, as it should be.

Don't force us to decide between human and machine for every job, and especially, as an application designer, don't impose your conception of what tasks should be done by which. As a user, closer to the coalface, I might well have a better idea. If your software gets in the way of my automation, it's wrong.