Linked by David Adams on Fri 5th Aug 2011 16:08 UTC
A couple of days ago I read a blog post by Stephen Ramsay, a professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and a Fellow at the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities. In it, he mentions that he has all but abandoned the GUI and finds the command line to be "faster, easier to understand, easier to integrate, more scalable, more portable, more sustainable, more consistent, and many, many times more flexible than even the most well-thought-out graphical apps." I found this very thought-provoking, because, like Ramsay, I spend a lot of time thinking about "The Future of Computing," and I think that the CLI, an interface from the past, might have a place in the interface of the future.
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RE[3]: Two distinct beasts...
by steogede2 on Fri 5th Aug 2011 22:29
in reply to "RE[2]: Two distinct beasts..."
Member since:2007-08-17
Seeing GUI as a superset of CLI is probably also not particularly helpful, when tons of data people care about doesn't really exist in textual form, but in graphical (sure, pedantically we might go down to how it is represented under the hood, but...)
You do realise he said "superset" not "subset"?
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Don't make out of it anything more than I wrote and you quoted (which includes "side note", "IIRC", "suggesting", "many" (!="most" for example); what is essentially everything I remember about it (well, plus how it was some research with a downloadable pdf, I think; and perhaps how it included more real-life, poorly-structured, end-user file management).
(so it's also not about finding an almost absolute edge case counterexample - simple, almost "atomic", highly repeatable text edit of every file at hand, what batch editing is pretty much about)
Seeing GUI as a superset of CLI is probably also not particularly helpful, when tons of data people care about doesn't really exist in textual form, but in graphical (sure, pedantically we might go down to how it is represented under the hood, but...)
That's kinda related to what I was pointing at, unnecessarily rigid distinctions and/or grouping of concepts. For example, is Google - or, even better, GMaps - a graphical or textual UI?
Well... both. It would be mostly quite horrible when presented and manipulated in a usual pure CLI fashion. But you do input textual commands (there's just no reason for them to be very CLI-like); and with routine automation even expected to be hidden by nice GUI, here and there.
Edited 2011-08-05 19:11 UTC