The Case Against GUIs, Revisited 720
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."
Re:Nobody needs a GUI or CLI (Score:4, Interesting)
The frustration of doing this was foreseen by some of the writers of Star Trek. If you watch some TNG episodes where Geordi interacts with the computer, you'll see him getting frustrated with it not understanding what he wants. I always felt that Geordi was a lot like an IT engineer of today.
We may be able to talk to computers, but I imagine it will be very hard to get them to the point that they understand each of our individual expectations. Even once we think they are comprehending, they still won't.
Re:First post (Score:5, Interesting)
Batch files are easy. The only people I've found to have trouble with any sort of scripting are people who grew up only using GUIs.
That being said, I grew up on old Macs and only started using windows at 15 when I got my first job in a computer shop. Not having used a CLI previously I dove straight into it and learnt all I could.
The problem with the whole user/CLI disconnection is that there is a perception among certification/uni degree holders that once you finish your qualification you don't need to learn anything further. I saw this happen to many people who graduated with my fiance, they learnt Windows, learnt how to use the GUIs for admin, and nothing more.
To be honest, I blame complacency and the fear of intellectualism for the decline in the CLI. It seems to be "cool" to be stupid in developed nations, intellectualism and learning are almost feared. Maybe it's due to editorials damming intellectualism, maybe it's to do with politicians damming intellectualism. I'm not quite sure, whatever the cause it's one of the worst things to happen to humanity.
Re:This, perhaps... (Score:5, Interesting)
The people at "GUI Industries" can't make a link or shortcut to the appropriate script?
Yes.
This is a huge flaw in almost all current GUI models. They've reinvented a whole object/component-based architecture on top of the old process/file-based CLI-accessible portions of the OS, and then provided basically no scriptability of those objects, and even less ways to interface the topmost GUI level to any scripts you do manage to somehow cobble together.
(Possible noteworthy exception-in-progress being PowerShell 2, Apple Automator (except AppleScript is a horrible language because it tries to be fake-English), and maybe some parts of RiscOS and OS/2. )
But this object/scripting gap is something I noticed way back in my teens, in the 80s, and couldn't bring myself to believe that the Top Minds in software architecture had missed this glaring oversight. But they had. Apparently everyone was going to either program in raw C++, or click icons, and nothing much in between. Basically there was no thought put into anything like a 'Unix shell' for Finder / Explorer and friends.
I mean, 5 seconds thought suggests that someone should have come up with a quick visual tool for dragging icons into a box, drawing lines between them, and having that save and load from a text file describing connections between components. And then make that a fundamental part of the OS and build all OS and application GUIs using that. If you ever came across a GUI you wanted to build for an application that couldn't be expressed in that language, then mark it as a bug in the language and extend the language.
Then we'd have had something approaching the power of Unix scripting for visual desktops, and we would have . But no. We went for a 'all GUIs will be sealed binaries written in low-level assembler or C++" approach. Then we deconstructed the GUI as web pages, and again, first chance we got, we ripped out Tim Berners-Lee's HTML editor component from all web browsers, enforced a hard split between "web server" and "web browser", and once again destroyed the ability for users to do their own interface design and to program their own workflow.
It's like we have this obsession with making things hard for ourselves just to keep application developers in jobs.