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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note I hadn't yet read the article, I will after I post. Perhaps a mistake? Well, based on the topic here is what I think - it depends. My mother, hardly a techy, was a complete wiz at her real-estate software back when it was purely command-line, but once the Windows, and later web version came out, she ends up calling me for assistance relatively fequently. Command-lines are not intuitive, and rarely obvious, but once you memorize the limited set of commands, thats all you ever need. She took a class, she learned the app, and that was that. In those early days she never, NEVER, once called for help. GUIs confuse the crap out of her, and shes been using Windows for at least two years now. Depending on the application, I think command-lines really are better for newbies. Insofar as unix newbies, yes yes yes learn the command-line first! Unixen remain, despite KDE and Gnome, quite command-line centric and knowing how to delve into terminal to fix something is gold. Now, to read that article...