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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This is definitely one of the better researched articles that OSNews has published.
I think the findings are interesting. People generally do want to feel like they're in control, and the thing I've noticed with newbies in the introductory programming class I tutor, is that they're afraid to experiment. There's this nagging fear that if you do something wrong, the computer will explode (or some other catastrophe). Once you make it clear to them that the worse thing that could happen is the computer crashing (not physically falling to the ground, but rather just locking up) they're off. Once they get the fact that the computer is dumb, and it does what they tell it to do, they start enjoying themselves.
This could apply to the command line too. I agree with the author that the command line does help keep the 'conversation' metaphor, and users feel like they're having a conversation with the computer.