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Has the Command Line Outstayed Its Welcome?
dgharmon writes "The Command Line Interface has its uses, acknowledged Mobile Raptor blogger Roberto Lim, but no piece of technology targeted at the consumer market should ever require that something be done via CLI, he says. Keep it as an option or you can take it out all together. 'If it is there, it should just be there for the IT people or tech support to use when you encounter a problem.'"
Sometimes you have to have a user ping something, telnet to something. I know it sucks and it is hard, but basic connectivity tests are what you need. /Love using AppNeta's PathView so I don't have to do this much anymore. //Just need the company to get more testing equipment.
Just a dude. Stuck in IT.
Thankfully, not many.
On the other hand, very thankfully many CAD applications and the like do have a 'command line'. Not a terminal one, but one built into the GUI.
The reason this is 'very thankfully' is because 1. some things really are just easier when typed in, and 2. it forces the developers to make everything that's doable through the UI, no matter how awkwardly, doable in the command line.
The latter is very important when you consider the potential for macros, batch operations, more full-fledged scripting, etc.
If anything, more applications should have command lines.
I realize the article is more about the main CLI, though - and the modifier "required".. in which case I agree, the CLI shouldn't really be required. It's just damn nice it's there when you want it.
When you use sed and awk you're beyond the reach of basic use of software and are really starting to head down the programming route. I guarantee there is no normal end user in the world, even linux users who even know what sed or awk is let alone can figure out the arcane (to the novice) syntax.
Guess what? Whenever you use formulas in Microsoft Excel, you're starting to head down the programming route. People do this all the time.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
If anything, more applications should have command lines.
This. Fucking, THIS!
All our scientific equipment (that is controlled by a PC, which means 90% of them) has a GUI. And a host of bugs or user errors related to the GUI. And then, contacting the vendor and getting support is a nightmare, with a GUI. My dream is that all of these devices get a CLI so I can just issue unambiguous commands of the type
That would be also scriptable, flexible, powerful, and as I said, unambiguous and easy to debug.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
>Typing in a few keywords is not CLI. That's just data input in response to a prompt.
Have you used windows 7? the search bar searches programs and enter executes them, I'd say that 85% of my customers are typing excel instead of mousing through multiple menus.
I had a scientific instrument that cost $70K ship with an embedded CPU running stock consumer-grade Windows 2000 with a massive 100-pin plug that included wires for keyboard, vga, mouse, and ethernet and a 50' cable. For an underwater application that was supposed to be "automated". Yes, their idea of automation was to put their craptastically bad GUI app in the Startup folder and have someone use a full KVM to get shit started. Oh, and the ethernet plug had an issue such that only 3 of the 4 wires could connect.
All I wanted was: power up, collect sample, transfer data, power down. Instead, I had to write multiple programs in Win32 to simulate mouse and keypresses to get the program to "take sample", re-wire the ethernet to 3-wire RS232 and run Kermit as a daemon, and a 2000-line Perl monitor to check available battery power and issue the shutdown commands if things were getting tight, or just kill power anyway and hope to God that when it came back up it wouldn't be stuck in chkdsk expecting user input.
The crazy thing is that they are still in business all these years later.
Nah, the real problem with Linux is the same thing it's been for years - lack of critical applications. Sure, these days, any web-based applications will work like a charm... but it's things crucial to your business - in my case AutoCAD, MasterCAM and our Infor ERP system - that prevent Linux on anything but the most basic of machines.
Once those apps get ported to Linux, I think we'd be running it within a couple of years, simply due to the lack of cost and stability(and excellent support for out-of-date hardware).
Users, well, they'll learn whatever it takes to get the job done. CLI is great for some things, horrible for others. GUI is great for some, horrible for others. It shouldn't be one or the other - blend the two. Have a good gui with common options, and a CLI box that can be pulled up for access to the complex and arcane extra features(which perhaps only 100 people in the world use, but for them it's critical).