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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@Ronald Crain: Yes, pointing and "grunting" is the easiest thing for a human to master without any training, but it is also one of the *least* expressive ways to communicate. The thing about the CLI is that it is extremely expressive. Thanks to the sheer power of human language skills, complex ideas can be specified succinctly. As computers become more integral to our lives, and schools start having computer training courses alongside mathematics and reading courses, we'll see more expressive (and thus productive!) forms of communication with the computer win out over the primitive "point and grunt" method.
As for integration of the CLI and GUI --- I've brought up the idea in a similar discussion awhile ago. I used AutoCAD as a wonderful example of this. AutoCAD is a piece of software that engineers used to do 2D drafting. Obviously, it needs some sort of graphical capability, since drafting is ultimately visual. However, it has an integrated CLI. Complex manipulations, such as bisecting angles or laying out certain verticies, are much faster using the CLI than using the GUI. What is also immensly helpful, and will be pretty much required for any CLI/GUI hybrid interface is a keyboard/mouse combo such as those found on laptops. Being able to do the occasional GUI task without removing your hands from the keyboard does wonders for productivity.