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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We should remember what the 'I' in 'CLI' stands for. This was a test of the interface rather than the commands themselves. Linux/Unix commands aren't intuitive, and have to be taught, but that's not the point. The students were happier with the interface because of it's similarity to any human communication. Maybe it helped them understand the 'computer as tool' concept - giving them the control they could easily understand - rather than 'computer as helpful friend' - seemingly what is used to sell computers to the masses these days.
So why aren't commands intuitive? I think mainly because they were designed to make things easier for the programmer, rather than the newbie. Saving time by shortening make directory to 'mkdir' is all well and good when the function can be easily guessed, but for the more esoteric commands? Is there not space for a full text alternative? BASIC became widely known because of it's simplicity, but could be 'shortcutted' - simplifying the command line could help make it the tool of choice, rather than the daunting back-up to any GUI.