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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The thing about GUIs of popular, widely used OSes or Windowing interfaces is that they all use similar principles and once you've mastered the principles, they serve a user well, no matter the OS.
Yes, there are things that will hang a user and throw them for a loop the first time in front of a new OS or Windowing interface, but these are small bumps and easily overcome. It took me a day to teach myself Aqua and leaping over to KDE wasn't much harder. I'll just drop down menus and click until I find what I'm looking for. Heck, because I knew the system of icons in W98, I had no problems navagating my Mother-In-Law's computer ... despite the fact that alles war auf Deutsch. (Everything was in German.)
However, teaching me a headful of DOS commands and then sitting me down in front of a *nix CLI isn't going to help. Or Vice Versa. Yeah, I'll understand the concepts of heirarchy and file paths and how to open the manual files but ... I'll have to open the manual for every freaking thing I want to do.
And if my native language isn't English, most of the commands I'll be typing will be little more than gobblygook. "mkdir" equaling "make directory" is fairly intutive if my native language is English, but not, say, Russian or Hindi.
(Case in point about switching from dos to *nix, I'm always having to reference my cheat sheet to see if I want to type or / in a pathname depending on the task I'm doing and what file server I'm dealing with. [XP desktop talking to XP, Solaris, or Linux servers.])
Don't get me wrong, the CLI has several merits. (And I think that any OS should have both ways of getting a task done.) But there are very compelling reasons that the GUI has become the standard way of interfacing with a computer.