Lately I've been thinking about optimal UIs for highly competitive environments (military, day trading, fraud reduction) and I've come to the view that the majo

Lately I've been thinking about optimal UIs for highly competitive environments (military, day trading, fraud reduction) and I've come to the view that the majority of these interfaces should be through an extensible command line interface - and given the plethora of easy to install open source software, I largely think that the CLI of choice should be a linux terminal shell. Some I could also see being delegated to either a spreadsheet or a mixture of a spreadsheet and a terminal shell, but in general I thing SQL wins against SUM_IF + macros + Solver. But if this is the optimal UI for highly competitive environments, why isn't it also the optimal UI for uncompetitive competitive environments like retail? Two reasons: 1. Self selection. The highly competitive environments attract extremely intelligent people. Abstractionists can assemble a breadth of solutions that systematize solutions, while workers such as retailers are generally less adept. 2. A constriction on UI is similar to a schema constriction. Aside from the occasional "General Notes" field on a intake form, the interaction can be structured more reliably than a person with a terminal shell. This is important partially because lesser skilled people can't be trusted to make higher level decisions like data structure. I don't think #2 is a hard limit, I think UIs can be designed around the limitations of human intelligence and I think that systemic educational changes could make CLIs more friendly to the general public; but I think there is a local maxima that is more easily solved with software like Tulip* and so that is what we have now. * http://tulip.io/ http://tulip.io/