Yuck. I program.NET at work because we are a.NET shop and I love my employers but hate the platform..NET encourages horrible programming style. Instead of objects which actually represent the type of data you are working with everything is DataSets, objects which represent databases. So, most.NET coders, even all the way up to the view layer are still writing stuff that looks like sql code rather than simply calling descriptively named methods in descriptively names objects.
Not to mention strong typing! I write more code trying to convert data from this type to that than actually executing an algorithm. This is especially the case when working with data from a database. Maybe it's better with MSSQL since it's all from Microsoft. We are using MySQL with.NET and it seems like any time we update the ODBC drivers or MySQL.NET changes it's mind about what datatypes it converts to and we start getting errors all over our program. And no, it does not make good decisions. For example, an unsigned in in MySQL becomes a signed long in.NET. Yeah, that is efficient!
Your code will be much easier to maintain, both debugging and adding new features in the future if you stick with PHP and a good, well thought out MVC framework.
And has anybody ever seen an ASP page that stays up reliably? All the ones I have ever seen crash frequently. Usually in the middle of the night. Mod Mono? Really? Does that even support all of ASP?
With any service I have used the DHCP server 'remembers' your MAC address and waits a considerable amount of time (days to weeks) for your return before giving the ip to someone else. unless the ip pool is close to exhaustion anyway...
Safari sucks. You can't even upload a photo through a webform using Safari. Stick with Android, the browser is mostly the same as both are webkit but you get full form functionality and Flash. Yes, Mobile Flash sucks. Set it to only run when asked for. Then wherever Flash is on a site you get a Flash icon. Click it when and only when the Flash was important and then it runs. It's the best of both worlds.
Why a MacBook? It's bigger, more expensive and feeds Apple. There are plenty of netbooks available with touch screens. I've even seen ones where the touch screen flips around over the keyboard to make it tablet like. Or... you can roll your own, there are touchscreens available as addons for plain netbooks.
I have an iPad2 and am not at all impressed with the browser. I had to pay for iCab just to be able to upload image files in a simple web form! And if I ever want to upload non-image files... Guess I have to use my Android phone instead.
Stick with Android if you want a good browser. Install Flash. Go into the browser settings and set Flash to only run when asked for. Now wherever a page has embedded Flash you just get a little Flash icon. If the Flash is an important part of the content just click it. Otherwise it doesn't run and doesn't slow down your device. Steve Jobs was right about Flash on mobile devices. It does suck. But sometimes you still just need it. This way you get the best of both worlds.
Android definitely has SSH and VNC apps. I don't know about X. I'm not sure about some of those others. If not those specifically then Android does have other services like them but I doubt he wants them. Those services are good for when you don't control your network (can't forward ports) or when you just aren't technically inclined enough to do so. (And how many people want to access their PCs remotely that aren't technically inclined?). Compared to using SSH/VNC/RDP they are slow because your connection is going through their server instead of direct. If you can forward a port then why pay somebody a monthly fee for a slower less direct connection when you can just uses ssh/vnc/rdp yourself?
Oh, btw... Yes, I have Windows at work (and that is where the iPad is from). But.. my home computer has Linux with no Windows partition. I can't remember the last time I needed a commercial app for anything. It's not that I would be opposed to paying a reasonable price for one but there just aren't any I need. The only ones I have had in several years have been games and they run just fine in Wine. For everything else free and mostly open source software has filled every need and done so well.
If you want a keyboard and you want to root it then is a tablet really the best device to serve your needs? Why not just get a netbook? I suppose you can still install Android x86 if you really want to.
I agree with everything you just wrote.
AND I agree with the guy who wrote that Capitalism is broken when there is no longer enough work to go around.
Every attempt so far to motivate people to produce other than Capitalism has failed. Most have ended up in tyranny. But... We don't need everybody working full time to produce what we NEED anymore. We don't even need that kind of labor to produce what we need plus a comfortable extra! Growing food and making things is too easy now with technology.
I am not advocating turning back on the technology. Individuals in an agrarian society are doomed to early deaths w/o modern medicine. The society itself is doomed too as all it takes is a few years of drought, or maybe a plague or a flood and it is gone.
We need a society that can keep people working but not as many hours. Capitalism keeps people producing by keeping them competing with one another. In a 'part time' (by todays standards) society people will just push themselves back to 'full time' in order to compete. Then there are no longer enough jobs to go around.
Any agrarian society WILL go extinct if it doesn't progress to something else. All it takes is a little climate change. Even without pollution it does happen naturally eventually.
I don't know what kind of libraries other slashdoters go to but I used to check out books that were decades old and had been checked out many many times. I think that for all but the most popular few percent of books wear-out is not a significant difference between lending and e-lending. If e-lending gets a use limit to supposedly simulate the wearing out of a paper book it will most likely be worse than truly equalizing the two.
Have you looked into e-lending? That's how it works. They are only licensed to let so many borrowers borrow at a time. The library can't just let unlimited users take a copy and go. I assume the DRM software doesn't allow it. It's like a book but more convenient and yes.. it doesn't wear out.
I think it's both a dirty trick and amusing. Come on, these are politicians. EVERY thing they do is a dirty trick. When they are annoying one another rather than screwing the rest of us at least it can provide a little amusement.
First, why assume they care if it works? They are political whores out to get paid by their corporate media lobbyist Johns. If this legislation is what the Johns want it is what gets them paid. It isn't their problem if it doesn't work.
Second.. it probably will work. You just aren't quite understanding the goal. No, it won't block everyone from downloading pirated stuff. It will however make it less 'marketable'. What I mean is the non-geeks won't bother. Remember the congressman twittering that he is bored with the technical explanantions of why SOPA is bad? Unfortunately, that has more in common with the general population than your average tech savy geek.
If the vast majority of non-geeks stop pirating (something I suspect is happening anyway due to the current popularity of iTunes and Amazon) then either the remaining pirates would be insignificant and could be ignored or... being a smaller group it would be easier to go after the individuals. In particular, being the geeks they would be the ones writing the p2p apps that they want to shut down.
Of course, we know that if the music or movie industries actually ARE suffering it's because their product is not a necessity and the economy sucks right now, their products have been sucking more and more over time and they have failed to adapt to a changing world. That isn't going to stop them from blaming the pirates and going after them first.
I love the fact that I can root my phone. If all the security holes were fixed would that still be possible? As far as I can tell nobody has ever taken advantage of any security holes on MY phone to cause me any trouble...
Siri has been such great publicity for Apple. I guess now Google can't afford not to copy it. As a long time Android user I think it looks like a neat toy.
The iPhone users I have talked to though mostly like Siri for it's voice recognition capabilities. In particular hands free texting and calling. That's been around for years on other platforms, including Android though. The users I have talked to indicated that having it talk back was actually more of an annoyance once the novelty wore off. Sure.. things like speaking the weather when asked are unique but the people I talk to don't even use those features.
And yet... when I mention my phone has done voice typing (not just for text messages but also any other place one would type) and voice calling for years I just get blank stares. Even my old WinCE phone did that! It's like when telling an Apple fan that something non-Apple does what they like (and without talking back) one instantly begins speaking some kind of foreign language!
I think Google knows 'humans' and is providing what they need and will use. But Apple knows marketing fluff.
" or Unix as we know it will become something like Mac - underneath a slick interface, but totally unknown by the everyday user because of its clunkiness."
Isn't it already? Well.. up until the 'clunkiness' part. That's your opinion, you are entitled to it but I'm sure many here don't share it.
I think we are talking about the Desktop here. On the desktop 'Unix' is mostly Linux or FreeBSD so that's what I am referring to. The 'Year of the Linux Desktop' may never arrive but I've know people who use it and know nothing about the kernel, the shell or anything like that. It just boots into KDE or Gnome and then it works. Just click on Chrome or Firefox, no different from any other OS.
"all annoying when they try to convert you"
Usually attempts at conversion of any kind are annoying. I don't try much anymore because I have learned that people aren't interested. Trying usually bothers me even more than the person I am talking to. I can sympathize with those trying to do so though.
First, there is no such thing as geeks and normal users. It's geeky normal users and normal users. I for one want my U/Linux power tools but I want all or most of the things 'normal' users want too! I don't know if there will ever be a 'Year of the Linux Desktop' but I sure wish there would.
The thing about all the 'normal' users changing, I just don't see they would suffer from it. You click the application you want to run and it does. On that level it's just like everything else. The opposite however is not true. Geeky power users have suffered.
I've been using Linux since about 1998. At first I just wanted my own web server and wasn't at all considering replacing Windows on my Desktop. I had the server in the common area of my dorm and found myself surfing on it when I wanted to use the internet but also wanted to hang out, watch tv, etc.. with my roomates. Having it there was convenient. I also hooked it to the stereo and could play 100s of MP3s on it which was a big deal when my friends were still drooling over CD changers. IM clients were big but not available on Linux yet. I remember when Tik was released and suddenly I didn't need Windows for daily use anymore. I had instant messaging mp3 playing and web browsing. The three things I needed for everyday use. Next up came Wordperfect. Great!! No more rebooting to write papers. Then came Linux drivers for 3dfx. Quake II for Linux, the Sims.(I didn't have the Sims but it was a big deal at the time) I was finding I actually preferred Linux and there was less and less reason to boot Windows.
It's not like I had set out on some OSS ideological quest or even out of a hatred of Windows. I still have never read 'The Cathedral and the Bizarre'. I just wanted a web server, in Linux a full featured one was free, in Windows that was still very expensive. But then I discovered I liked it better. For me, the Linux Desktop had arrived and it was good.
And then stuff happened. Wordperfect lost out to Microsoft Office which will likely never be available under Linux or fully compatible with anything that is. Flash became an important part of web browsing. It got to the point were it seemed like the majority of the interesting content was unavailable without a recent Flash. But Macromedia stopped developing for Linux. 3dFX went out of business. ATI and NVidia refused to release 3d drivers or enough information about their products to allow anybody to write them for years. To a generation of computer geeks (aren't most gamers, at least when they are young) desktop Linux was dead. Games stopped even being released with Linux versions.
Things are better now. Flash is available (and going away anyway). Open Office handles MSOffice formats well enough for most usage (IMHO). NVidia has been developing working (though not quite perfect) drivers for a while now and ATI is playing nice with OSS developers. Wine runs most things good enough, even games. (come on Photoshop!) Still, this could all happen again. I
Yes, tab completion is awesome. It definitely makes long commands easier to deal with. It doesn't solve all the issues though.
Abbreviations are great too. I've used some languages and protocols where the first few characters of the name are the abreviation. As a shortcut most parsers were written to just ignore characters past those important few meaning you could type anything after them.
There are two problems I still see though...
One is that having abbreviations means twice the reserved words. This is especially an issue with the longer, 'real english' words. Every time you make a command out of a word you are making it more difficult to use it as a filename w/o ambiguity.
The bigger issue... permanence. I know DOS and Unix fairly well. I don't want to learn a new commandline. Powershell for example has intrigued me ever since it was first released. Guess what I have not and still will not be spending my Friday night doing... learning power shell. I suspect that 10s of thousands if not 100s of thousands admins and users out there feel the same way.
Is this just one generation being selfish? Will we eventually retire or die off finally leaving the new generation to drop a legacy from times when memory was expensive (one part of the reason for short commands) and user interface design were a new and unknown science?
Maybe... To an extent. But if so it is going to happen again to every generation forever. Which 'English' words do you chose for your commands? Let's take another look at the original post's examples, in particular 'man' again. Once upon a time everything came with manuals. I bet it was pretty natural for people to think of a manual when they needed help and a 'man' command is not a very big step from there. Now.. every thing has been cheapened and pennies can be saved by not including manuals. Most things do not. I think I remember reading that 'grep' had some significance outside of computing at the time it became a unix command. I don't remember what though. The point is that things change and the words that are chosen today will not make as much sense in 10 years, 20 years, etc...
Should computing be renewed for every generation with a whole new set of commands? I don't think so. For one thing, admins and users don't come in discreet generations. Any time you make this change somebody is caught in the middle and has to re-learn everything. Nobody wants to do that!
Besides... while I could argue all day that a commandline IS an easy and natural way to communicate with a computer (we communicate with each other through language, not by clicking pictures) it is not something 'normal' people do anymore. The commandline might as well cater to the admin and not the general public because that is who will use it.
I'm aware of that option but it's ugly and hard to read. You could also of course use "Ya quote the embedded spaces, ya lazy moron". That's not so hard on the eyes but it could be easier to mentally lose track of the quotes.
Maybe it's not targeted for the geometry geek you insensitive clod. Maybe it's the general geek, or some other kind of geek who wouldn't mind dabbling in a little bit of geometry geekiness.
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Yuck. I program .NET at work because we are a .NET shop and I love my employers but hate the platform. .NET encourages horrible programming style. Instead of objects which actually represent the type of data you are working with everything is DataSets, objects which represent databases. So, most .NET coders, even all the way up to the view layer are still writing stuff that looks like sql code rather than simply calling descriptively named methods in descriptively names objects.
.NET and it seems like any time we update the ODBC drivers or MySQL .NET changes it's mind about what datatypes it converts to and we start getting errors all over our program. And no, it does not make good decisions. For example, an unsigned in in MySQL becomes a signed long in .NET. Yeah, that is efficient!
Not to mention strong typing! I write more code trying to convert data from this type to that than actually executing an algorithm. This is especially the case when working with data from a database. Maybe it's better with MSSQL since it's all from Microsoft. We are using MySQL with
Your code will be much easier to maintain, both debugging and adding new features in the future if you stick with PHP and a good, well thought out MVC framework.
And has anybody ever seen an ASP page that stays up reliably? All the ones I have ever seen crash frequently. Usually in the middle of the night. Mod Mono? Really? Does that even support all of ASP?
With any service I have used the DHCP server 'remembers' your MAC address and waits a considerable amount of time (days to weeks) for your return before giving the ip to someone else. unless the ip pool is close to exhaustion anyway...
Safari sucks. You can't even upload a photo through a webform using Safari. Stick with Android, the browser is mostly the same as both are webkit but you get full form functionality and Flash. Yes, Mobile Flash sucks. Set it to only run when asked for. Then wherever Flash is on a site you get a Flash icon. Click it when and only when the Flash was important and then it runs. It's the best of both worlds.
Why a MacBook? It's bigger, more expensive and feeds Apple. There are plenty of netbooks available with touch screens. I've even seen ones where the touch screen flips around over the keyboard to make it tablet like. Or... you can roll your own, there are touchscreens available as addons for plain netbooks.
I have an iPad2 and am not at all impressed with the browser. I had to pay for iCab just to be able to upload image files in a simple web form! And if I ever want to upload non-image files... Guess I have to use my Android phone instead.
Stick with Android if you want a good browser. Install Flash. Go into the browser settings and set Flash to only run when asked for. Now wherever a page has embedded Flash you just get a little Flash icon. If the Flash is an important part of the content just click it. Otherwise it doesn't run and doesn't slow down your device. Steve Jobs was right about Flash on mobile devices. It does suck. But sometimes you still just need it. This way you get the best of both worlds.
Android definitely has SSH and VNC apps. I don't know about X. I'm not sure about some of those others. If not those specifically then Android does have other services like them but I doubt he wants them. Those services are good for when you don't control your network (can't forward ports) or when you just aren't technically inclined enough to do so. (And how many people want to access their PCs remotely that aren't technically inclined?). Compared to using SSH/VNC/RDP they are slow because your connection is going through their server instead of direct. If you can forward a port then why pay somebody a monthly fee for a slower less direct connection when you can just uses ssh/vnc/rdp yourself?
Oh, btw... Yes, I have Windows at work (and that is where the iPad is from). But.. my home computer has Linux with no Windows partition. I can't remember the last time I needed a commercial app for anything. It's not that I would be opposed to paying a reasonable price for one but there just aren't any I need. The only ones I have had in several years have been games and they run just fine in Wine. For everything else free and mostly open source software has filled every need and done so well.
If you want a keyboard and you want to root it then is a tablet really the best device to serve your needs? Why not just get a netbook? I suppose you can still install Android x86 if you really want to.
Why is this modded down? Just because somebody disagrees?
I agree with everything you just wrote. AND I agree with the guy who wrote that Capitalism is broken when there is no longer enough work to go around.
Every attempt so far to motivate people to produce other than Capitalism has failed. Most have ended up in tyranny. But... We don't need everybody working full time to produce what we NEED anymore. We don't even need that kind of labor to produce what we need plus a comfortable extra! Growing food and making things is too easy now with technology.
I am not advocating turning back on the technology. Individuals in an agrarian society are doomed to early deaths w/o modern medicine. The society itself is doomed too as all it takes is a few years of drought, or maybe a plague or a flood and it is gone.
We need a society that can keep people working but not as many hours. Capitalism keeps people producing by keeping them competing with one another. In a 'part time' (by todays standards) society people will just push themselves back to 'full time' in order to compete. Then there are no longer enough jobs to go around.
Any agrarian society WILL go extinct if it doesn't progress to something else. All it takes is a little climate change. Even without pollution it does happen naturally eventually.
I don't know what kind of libraries other slashdoters go to but I used to check out books that were decades old and had been checked out many many times. I think that for all but the most popular few percent of books wear-out is not a significant difference between lending and e-lending. If e-lending gets a use limit to supposedly simulate the wearing out of a paper book it will most likely be worse than truly equalizing the two.
Have you looked into e-lending? That's how it works. They are only licensed to let so many borrowers borrow at a time. The library can't just let unlimited users take a copy and go. I assume the DRM software doesn't allow it. It's like a book but more convenient and yes.. it doesn't wear out.
I think you just did separate them.
Why?
How about authors and editors just negotiate their own deals as they please on a per-book basis?
She killed him.
I think it's both a dirty trick and amusing. Come on, these are politicians. EVERY thing they do is a dirty trick. When they are annoying one another rather than screwing the rest of us at least it can provide a little amusement.
Hey everybody, I think he is talking about this guy: http://www.andrewgarvey.com/wizard/characters/Images/The%20Scarecrow%201.jpg
First, why assume they care if it works? They are political whores out to get paid by their corporate media lobbyist Johns. If this legislation is what the Johns want it is what gets them paid. It isn't their problem if it doesn't work. Second.. it probably will work. You just aren't quite understanding the goal. No, it won't block everyone from downloading pirated stuff. It will however make it less 'marketable'. What I mean is the non-geeks won't bother. Remember the congressman twittering that he is bored with the technical explanantions of why SOPA is bad? Unfortunately, that has more in common with the general population than your average tech savy geek. If the vast majority of non-geeks stop pirating (something I suspect is happening anyway due to the current popularity of iTunes and Amazon) then either the remaining pirates would be insignificant and could be ignored or... being a smaller group it would be easier to go after the individuals. In particular, being the geeks they would be the ones writing the p2p apps that they want to shut down. Of course, we know that if the music or movie industries actually ARE suffering it's because their product is not a necessity and the economy sucks right now, their products have been sucking more and more over time and they have failed to adapt to a changing world. That isn't going to stop them from blaming the pirates and going after them first.
We do! We want to hear from everybody! Well.. everybody except you.
I love the fact that I can root my phone. If all the security holes were fixed would that still be possible? As far as I can tell nobody has ever taken advantage of any security holes on MY phone to cause me any trouble...
Is it humans that Apple gets or just marketing?
Siri has been such great publicity for Apple. I guess now Google can't afford not to copy it. As a long time Android user I think it looks like a neat toy.
The iPhone users I have talked to though mostly like Siri for it's voice recognition capabilities. In particular hands free texting and calling. That's been around for years on other platforms, including Android though. The users I have talked to indicated that having it talk back was actually more of an annoyance once the novelty wore off. Sure.. things like speaking the weather when asked are unique but the people I talk to don't even use those features.
And yet... when I mention my phone has done voice typing (not just for text messages but also any other place one would type) and voice calling for years I just get blank stares. Even my old WinCE phone did that! It's like when telling an Apple fan that something non-Apple does what they like (and without talking back) one instantly begins speaking some kind of foreign language!
I think Google knows 'humans' and is providing what they need and will use. But Apple knows marketing fluff.
" or Unix as we know it will become something like Mac - underneath a slick interface, but totally unknown by the everyday user because of its clunkiness."
Isn't it already? Well.. up until the 'clunkiness' part. That's your opinion, you are entitled to it but I'm sure many here don't share it.
I think we are talking about the Desktop here. On the desktop 'Unix' is mostly Linux or FreeBSD so that's what I am referring to. The 'Year of the Linux Desktop' may never arrive but I've know people who use it and know nothing about the kernel, the shell or anything like that. It just boots into KDE or Gnome and then it works. Just click on Chrome or Firefox, no different from any other OS.
"all annoying when they try to convert you"
Usually attempts at conversion of any kind are annoying. I don't try much anymore because I have learned that people aren't interested. Trying usually bothers me even more than the person I am talking to. I can sympathize with those trying to do so though.
First, there is no such thing as geeks and normal users. It's geeky normal users and normal users. I for one want my U/Linux power tools but I want all or most of the things 'normal' users want too! I don't know if there will ever be a 'Year of the Linux Desktop' but I sure wish there would.
The thing about all the 'normal' users changing, I just don't see they would suffer from it. You click the application you want to run and it does. On that level it's just like everything else. The opposite however is not true. Geeky power users have suffered.
I've been using Linux since about 1998. At first I just wanted my own web server and wasn't at all considering replacing Windows on my Desktop. I had the server in the common area of my dorm and found myself surfing on it when I wanted to use the internet but also wanted to hang out, watch tv, etc.. with my roomates. Having it there was convenient. I also hooked it to the stereo and could play 100s of MP3s on it which was a big deal when my friends were still drooling over CD changers. IM clients were big but not available on Linux yet. I remember when Tik was released and suddenly I didn't need Windows for daily use anymore. I had instant messaging mp3 playing and web browsing. The three things I needed for everyday use. Next up came Wordperfect. Great!! No more rebooting to write papers. Then came Linux drivers for 3dfx. Quake II for Linux, the Sims.(I didn't have the Sims but it was a big deal at the time) I was finding I actually preferred Linux and there was less and less reason to boot Windows.
It's not like I had set out on some OSS ideological quest or even out of a hatred of Windows. I still have never read 'The Cathedral and the Bizarre'. I just wanted a web server, in Linux a full featured one was free, in Windows that was still very expensive. But then I discovered I liked it better. For me, the Linux Desktop had arrived and it was good.
And then stuff happened. Wordperfect lost out to Microsoft Office which will likely never be available under Linux or fully compatible with anything that is. Flash became an important part of web browsing. It got to the point were it seemed like the majority of the interesting content was unavailable without a recent Flash. But Macromedia stopped developing for Linux. 3dFX went out of business. ATI and NVidia refused to release 3d drivers or enough information about their products to allow anybody to write them for years. To a generation of computer geeks (aren't most gamers, at least when they are young) desktop Linux was dead. Games stopped even being released with Linux versions.
Things are better now. Flash is available (and going away anyway). Open Office handles MSOffice formats well enough for most usage (IMHO). NVidia has been developing working (though not quite perfect) drivers for a while now and ATI is playing nice with OSS developers. Wine runs most things good enough, even games. (come on Photoshop!) Still, this could all happen again. I
Yes, tab completion is awesome. It definitely makes long commands easier to deal with. It doesn't solve all the issues though.
Abbreviations are great too. I've used some languages and protocols where the first few characters of the name are the abreviation. As a shortcut most parsers were written to just ignore characters past those important few meaning you could type anything after them.
There are two problems I still see though...
One is that having abbreviations means twice the reserved words. This is especially an issue with the longer, 'real english' words. Every time you make a command out of a word you are making it more difficult to use it as a filename w/o ambiguity.
The bigger issue... permanence. I know DOS and Unix fairly well. I don't want to learn a new commandline. Powershell for example has intrigued me ever since it was first released. Guess what I have not and still will not be spending my Friday night doing... learning power shell. I suspect that 10s of thousands if not 100s of thousands admins and users out there feel the same way.
Is this just one generation being selfish? Will we eventually retire or die off finally leaving the new generation to drop a legacy from times when memory was expensive (one part of the reason for short commands) and user interface design were a new and unknown science?
Maybe... To an extent. But if so it is going to happen again to every generation forever. Which 'English' words do you chose for your commands? Let's take another look at the original post's examples, in particular 'man' again. Once upon a time everything came with manuals. I bet it was pretty natural for people to think of a manual when they needed help and a 'man' command is not a very big step from there. Now.. every thing has been cheapened and pennies can be saved by not including manuals. Most things do not. I think I remember reading that 'grep' had some significance outside of computing at the time it became a unix command. I don't remember what though. The point is that things change and the words that are chosen today will not make as much sense in 10 years, 20 years, etc...
Should computing be renewed for every generation with a whole new set of commands? I don't think so. For one thing, admins and users don't come in discreet generations. Any time you make this change somebody is caught in the middle and has to re-learn everything. Nobody wants to do that!
Besides... while I could argue all day that a commandline IS an easy and natural way to communicate with a computer (we communicate with each other through language, not by clicking pictures) it is not something 'normal' people do anymore. The commandline might as well cater to the admin and not the general public because that is who will use it.
No, see the part about not wanting to relearn everything every so many years.
I'm aware of that option but it's ugly and hard to read. You could also of course use "Ya quote the embedded spaces, ya lazy moron". That's not so hard on the eyes but it could be easier to mentally lose track of the quotes.
Maybe it's not targeted for the geometry geek you insensitive clod. Maybe it's the general geek, or some other kind of geek who wouldn't mind dabbling in a little bit of geometry geekiness.