Linked by Richard Wareham on Mon 8th Mar 2004 20:49 UTC
This essay describes the surprising results of a brief trial with a group of new computer users about the relative ease of the command line interface versus the GUIs now omnipresent in computer interfaces. It comes from practical experience I have of teaching computing to complete beginners or newbies as computer power-users often term them.
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I think you've missed the point.
What you're describing is a power users interface that combines the best of both worlds, it makes things faster, and the expense of being more complex, not less. Prehaps something like (slightly modified though) screen would be more apropriate.
One of the key problems he pointed out that people have is when it is apropriate to use the mouse or keyboard. Apple has enjoyed a partial success here, since everything is mouse drive, except when explicitly entering text.
The natural language thing is... well, it's a nice idea. AI research has been grappling with this for quite some time. The main problem seems to be that everyone has very different ideas about what constitutes a natural language. For me, saying something like;
"xmms recursive enqueue /home/edward/music/"
makes perfect sense, where as for other people they may expect something like;
"play all my music files"
Does that mean all the files in the music folder? Including music videos? What about other music files on the computer? Perhaps they have a broadband connection with a subscription to a music channel/station.
Given enough time, a natural language interface may work, but I don't think we understand the process enough, nor do we have enough processing power or memory. Nice idea though.