Slashdot Mirror
How Ya Gonna Get 'Em Down On the UNIX Farm?
theodp writes "In 1919, Nora Bayes sang, "How ya gonna keep 'em down on the farm after they've seen Paree?" In 2013, discussing User Culture Versus Programmer Culture, CS Prof Philip Guo poses a similar question: 'How ya gonna get 'em down on UNIX after they've seen Spotify?' Convincing students from user culture to toss aside decades of advances in graphical user interfaces for a UNIX command line is a tough sell, Guo notes, and one that's made even more difficult when the instructors feel the advantages are self-evident. 'Just waving their arms and shouting "because, because UNIX!!!" isn't going to cut it,' he advises. Guo's tips for success? 'You need to gently introduce students to why these tools will eventually make them more productive in the long run,' Guo suggests, 'even though there is a steep learning curve at the outset. Start slow, be supportive along the way, and don't disparage the GUI-based tools that they are accustomed to using, no matter how limited you think those tools are. Bridge the two cultures.'" Required reading.
Not everyone cares.
Those who do, while learn the power of the command line, just like myself and many others. Those who don't, will be happy with the guy.
THATS FINE. STOP TRYING TO CHANGE THAT.
Not EVERYONE needs to be a sysadmin or developer. Some people do stuff other than dick with computers 24/7 so knowing how to use awk is a waste of time, just like I doubt too many of you guys know how to milk a cow (even just hook one up to the milker which is pretty much automatic today).
Different tools for different jobs. Not all of us need a freaking hammer.
-BitZtream
Sure. The problem is teaching people to be admins. If they refuse to use the CLI, then it doesn't matter if they are smart or not - they will not learn. This was the focus of the original article: teaching students used to GUIs.
Any dumbass can do stuff in a GUI, but real BAMFs rock a terminal.
At least, that's how it was sold to me when I was a young'in. Worked pretty well, too.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
I wonder how much of his advice actually works? People who like using CLI seem to be cut from a different cloth than people who fawn over glitsy GUI interfaces. That's been my observation, anyway. Some newbies just gravitate toward the alluring green-text-on-black-background cli that seems to hold the promise of a deeper computing experience. They tend to find it. :)
For casual users, anything with a steep learning curve (no matter how powerful) is a tough sell because they'll probably spend more time learning than they would save. Trying to evangelize them may be morally satisfying; but is largely pointless.
For people who actually want to do something computer related, at scale, surely anybody sharp enough to be left unsupervised near a computer will learn (the hard way, if necessary) why we use tools with steep learning curves and great power: because the alternative is an essentially unbounded amount of error-prone manual labor.
If that doesn't become clear to them fairly quickly, either the GUI tools are working just fine for them, or they aren't in an area where the CLI really shines, or they should really consider doing something else. You shouldn't need to turn on the hard sell.
Choices of specific tools, with their quirks dating back to design constraints or decisions made, in some cases, before today's students were born are largely a matter of taste; but the use of tricky but high-powered tools swiftly shows itself to be necessary. You just can't click fast enough, even if you wanted to.
GUIs tend to suck at automation because all GUIs tend to assume that end users are blithering morons.
The problem with a GUI is that there may not be a "fully functional interface". It may simply not exist yet. Creating one by stringing together tools in a good shell is a lot easier and quicker than building a full blown GUI app.
Do more than one of something then a command line or programming environment will likely benefit you if you aren't interested in endless busy work.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
It took me a minute to realize the author thinks gui interfaces are Gay Paree and the command line is back on the farm. In my experience it's the other way around - once the kids have discovered the flexibility and utility of the command line it's a bit hard to keep them in the walled garden of gui interfaces.
Any gui is absolutely great as long as a) the task you're trying to do with it is one the programmer/designer has anticipated; and b) the programmer has done a decent job. As soon as you're trying to do something that a gui designer hasn't though of, it suddenly becomes difficult or impossible to get anything done, whereas you can usually work out a way to do it using the multiple small pipeable tools available in your average shell.
I wish I could comment directly on the original article. Here's what I'd say:
If computer science students are unwilling to learn something, then fail them. End of story.
Not everything is exciting and flashy. Should we refrain from teaching the multiplication table because we have calculators now to do it for us? Any CS graduate who hasn't worked with the CLI during his/her studies is simply not worth hiring and indeed should not be permitted to graduate.
Apple and it's fanboys will only acknowledge the Unix underpinnings of MacOS when they need a marketing bulletpoint or want to win a pointless argument with a total stranger.
Beyond that, MacOS is all about it's own thing completely separate and distinct from all of the other Unixen. It has always been it's own thing, even before the bolted all of the visible parts onto something else.
If you care about the Unix-y bits, you are just as likely to be completely unimpressed by the rest.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
No. Argument ad homenium is not needed.
It's got nothing to do with the arrogance or competence of the builders. GUIs tend to suck at automation because of the assumption that each interface, when presented, shall be manipulated by a human. This assumption is a reasonable one, and destroys automation before you start - the best you can hope for is applying the presented default after a timeout period, which makes for exceptionally slow progress. Automation that needs constant human intervention is (and I'll be kind here) not automation.
If opportunity came disguised as temptation, one knock would be enough.
3^2 * 67^1 * 977^1
I hate to break it to you, but I can ALSO write a black box executable that you can call with "connect-nacontroller ctrl1.dom.local \; get-na vol" and have it do magic shit behind the scenes. The fact that, on unix, I do not need to and can use teh tools the OS provides is the whole fucking point. This is why powershell sucks. You can only do the tasks someone else already programmed for you. Get it through your dense head.
Wow... Just wow...
Expanding on your example, what was the MacOS way to set the color on 7,000 items, out of 10,000 that were in that location? Did the GUI tool that you are so certain is the "One True Way" provide an easy way to do that?
GUIs may be great for the type of work you do, but I assure you, there is a LOT of work to be done for which GUI tools are absolutely horrible.