Linked by Greg Afinogenov on Wed 3rd Sep 2003 07:19 UTC
It is not fashionable nowadays to speak of the merits of the command line, in an age where things like streaming video and Aqua are an integral part of our daily life. However, I do not think that typed-in commands must necessarily be consigned to the dustbin of computer history. Of course, I am not suggesting that we all drop X and Windows and pretend like we are living in the early eighties. The command line interface still has much to offer us, and many of its benefits simply cannot physically be emulated or even replaced by graphical ones.
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The Unix-Hater's Handbook (out of print, free pdf available online, search for it on Google) is full of anecdotes of problems that occur when you try to treat everything as a stream. (For the uninitiated, the "everything as a stream" concept is tightly coupled, or intermingled, with the CLI shell.) Check out chapter 8 on "csh, pipes, and find" for some examples.
I'm not saying the CLI is bad, I'm just saying CLI tools themselves have limitations in the way they are currently implemented (although some of those bugs have hopefully been fixed by now, but I'm too scared to check).
As the author of this article has stated, GUI scripting tools also have their limitations, one of which is the difficulty in making them as flexible and powerful as their CLI counterparts. So while there's room on both sides to grow, I think Charles E Hardwidge is right on the money in his comment about moving towards systems that don't need the CLI. It's the next evolutionary step in shell programming.