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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.'"
Guy is a fucking moron. Thats all.
Mod headline -1, flamebait.
(and the summary is silly, as well—how many popular software products today actually require the end user to run terminal commands?)
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
No. Fucking. Way.
A squid eating dough in a polyethylene bag is fast and bulbous, got me?
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.
Article = flamebait.
No sig today...
The GUI - Making easy things easier, and hard things impossible. (Seriously, there are still a lot of command line tools like sed and awk which are absolutely invaluable, with no real non-commandline alternatives)
The light-switch is one of the end-user interfaces for electricity in the house. The wiring behind it is better left to the experts. It's dangerous for the non-initiated to fiddle with it.
Same for the command line. Graphical user interfaces have become the de-facto end-user interface to modern computing devices, to information, to the Internet, etc. The CLI exposes some of the wiring behind it. No need for end users to mess with it or to have to understand it. It can be confusing for them or even dangerous.
The sooner software developers realize this, the better it is for everyone involved.
It may be sad that today's users are not introduced at the same level to the technology that many of us were decades ago, but that's the way things go. We don't expect to wire up our house ourselves, or build our own generators or electric engines. We shouldn't expect that a product for the masses should require in-depth knowledge or even expose an interface that is not really useful for every day users.
I invoke Betteridge's Law of Headlines here.
No.
CLI is the defacto interface for Google searches. People use it everyday and all day long. Nobody complains that it isn't intuitive.
Typing in a few keywords is not CLI. That's just data input in response to a prompt.
Using the more complex search modifiers does make it more like CLI use as you are driving behavior - but most people do not do that.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
My only issue (other than the inflammatory headline) is that these are lessons that were learned thirty years ago. Do we really have to remind developers that non-experts prefer point-and-click interfaces that elucidate the program's functions or that command lines are efficient and allow greater nuance?
A GUI is to a CLI as gesture is to speech. One is multidimensional, pictorial, concrete. The other is unidimensional, verbal, abstract. Each has an advantage at certain tasks: Using a computer that only works visually is like trying to convey War and Peace through mime. Conversely, to a user untrained in a particular application, accomplishing tasks via a command line is like trying to have a meaningful telephone conversation with an aborigine.
Which is better? I don't care—give me both, thank you very much. Visual interfaces are indispensable as they can display complex information in an intuitive and language-independent manner. But please give me an interface to talk to the application and string programs together with all the grammatical complexity of a command line.
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
Damn it, this really bothers me. I'm usually very careful to check my theories and hunches before I post a comment, but I really messed that one up. Now instead of modding me down, like I asked, people are modding it up. Apologies to Roberto Lim and Robin Miller, and anybody who read what I wrote but missed the AC's correction.
I want to blame the Euro soccer finals and copious amounts of alcohol, but I should know better than to drink and post.
Ah, arrogance and stupidity, all in the same package. How efficient of you. -- Londo Mollari
The command line is great for people that have memorized all the commands, know exactly what they want to do, and can run the operations in their sleep. But for everyone else it's a hinderence.
How could this post be +4 insightful?
If you have two screwdrivers in your toolbox but only ever use one, the unused one is NOT a hinderance. Others have a need for that 2nd screwdriver.
Look, most people have working legs so all those wheelchair ramps are a hinderance.
You should NEVER have to go to command line.
Then a lot of what you can do with a program will never get coded in a GUI. Even Windows has regedit!
Look past the end of your nose.
please remind us where the word 'prompt' comes from... the 'bash prompt' or 'shell prompt'.
you type 'key words' into it and get responses.
why does it work? because its an anlogue of verbal communication. .. which humans have been doing for 10,000+ years.
as opposed to 'poking square things that look like candy' which humans have been doing for 20 years.
since 99.9% of users will not have the permissions to start up an access database, and the "IT crew" will be too busy / underfunded to help them, they will revert to sharing Excel files on sharepoint.
furthermore, since the vast majority of people in these corporations have never been trained in database stuff, and the company will not pay to train them, excel is something that is essentially something 'anyone can use' the basic features of and still kind of understand whats happening without much training.
"These days"? Get real, Microsoft has NEVER had a consistent user interface across their applications.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
"Microsoft has NEVER had a consistent user interface across their applications."
You're forgetting the days of the "Blue Screen of Death." That was pretty consistent.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
I would say from the release of Windows 95 to the release of Office 2007, they were pretty much within their own standard style guidelines for GUI more or less across the board. That would be 12 years, which is a fairly significant amount of time in the computing world.
another M$-Windows-like kludge?
Last I checked MS is pushing Server Core (aka GUI-less server install) and powershell everything.
You were saying?
PS: the registry isnt a bad idea, it just has a lot of cruft. Most anti-registry sentiment is based on ignorance.
Just the other day a Linux distro decided that they want to do away with "Upgrade Kernel Without Reboot" feature of Linux
Now this guy wants to do away with CLI
Just what do they want to turn Linux into - another M$-Windows-like kludge?
While they are at it, why don't they import the "Windows registry feature" into Linux, and/or turn Linux into a proprietary closed-sourced OS??
Why can't they just leave Linux alone?
Well... given that I reboot about as often as I get laid, this should increase the number of times I get laid in a year. Where do I sign up?
Linux is great for systems that will be managed by folks who do Linux, and its great when those folks can set up a locked down system for someone else. But as an every day replacement for Windows, to be managed and run by average Joe? Yea, not quite yet.
Not even Windows can be adequately managed by Joe and Jane Average. You need a minimal level of understanding in order to keep any system running - not even talking about keeping it safe. I even get silly questions from the Mac users...
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).