4 ms·

Honestly it comes down to whether or not you want to understand how something really works. If you are 99% of users then someone has pre-anticipated everything

by wfo 11y ago

Honestly it comes down to whether or not you want to understand how something really works. If you are 99% of users then someone has pre-anticipated everything you will ever do with a computer and so there are nice pretty GUI tools to do whatever you want to do that someone has worked very hard and possibly been paid a great deal of money to create to make your life easier. If you are going to be building things or programming or creating new things you have to understand how things actually work. I'm sorry if that means you need to know that python on OSX is different from python on Windows but you do. If you are doing research by definition your needs can never be anticipated so you will never have pretty GUI tools to satisfy your needs. So I know the command line sucks for most people but if you want to do real work you're going to have to learn how to use it since it drops all of the leaky abstractions that prevent you from doing what you need to do when you're doing something novel.

tormeh 11y ago
The command-line is also an abstraction. I'm not anti-command line (for non-user stuff), but it irks me that we see the command line as some kind of god-given fundamental bloc, rather than just another abstraction that just happen to be at a level most programmers are happy with. I think the command line will persist as long as keyboards are the primary data entry tool, but nothing makes the command line inherently less leaky than other interfaces.
- wfo 11y ago
  The command line isn't an abstraction: a particular shell is, sure. Directly inputting machine instructions is a form of a command line. At its most basic the computer is executing an ordered sequence of commands and you need a way to tell it to execute the commands you wish. Machines run on a sequence of function-argument instructions -- this is fundamentally what the command line is. I suppose you could invent a GUI that lets you click on the opcodes and memory addresses you want to execute but that's bordering on silly. It's always going to be very awkward to capture fundamental computation with a GUI unless the way the machines work changes in a big way. Every machine in existence has a command line interface. Some of them have GUIs built on top of that. Sounds pretty fundamental to me.
  - tormeh 11y ago
    >Every machine in existence has a command line interface. No they don't. Embedded computers do not have command lines, for example. Embedded computers don't give a shit about text. Most computers do not accept commands at all. As for those who do, some don't accept it in text form, for example gaming consoles or punch-card antiquities. Command lines are the consequence of keyboards, and whenever you see a computer on which a keyboard cannot be attached or emulated (phones) then you're looking at a computer without a command line.
    - wfo 11y ago
      Okay, a trivial and meaningless nitpick but a technically accurate one. Every general purpose computing machine that you can interact with and reprogram can be done by command line. Sometimes you have to plug another machine and use ITS command line to send communications to the original machine. I'll agree with you that microwaves do not have command line interfaces but calling them "computers" is quite a stretch.
      - tormeh 11y ago
        No, it's not a meaningless nitpick! Yes, general purpose computers need to be programmed, but the reason we do it with a command line is because we prefer keyboards for data entry. When we stop using keyboards we will stop using command lines, just as we've stopped using punch cards. Everything that's not manually and physically setting voltages on memory is an abstraction. It's important to note that the command line is more an UI than an abstraction, though. Where the command line is on the abstraction level depends on implementation. Which one UI we use depends on convenience.
        vacri 11y ago
        > Everything that's not manually and physically setting voltages on memory If you're going to be that pedantic, then you should go all the way and note that there are computers that have neither memory nor use electricity.
        11y ago
kragen 11y ago
I think you have it backwards. Someone has pre-anticipated 99% of everything you will ever do with a computer, no matter who you are. And if you don't take the time to learn the things that let you do these things in one minute flat each: comm -13 <(./foo | sort) <(sed 's/ //' < bar | sort ) > foos-not-in-bar awk 'BEGIN {while (getline < "/home/ubuntu/foo/bar" > 0) {sym[$1]=1}} ($2 in sym) {print $0}' sizes | sort -rn join -v2 <(cat ../foo ../bar | sort) <(sort ../baz) > quux zgrep -n " XYZ," /foo/bar.out.gz | awk '{print $0} END {print NR}' ./configure && make ...then you are going to spend an hour writing each one of them in Java or C++ or some nonsense like that and then debugging it. With Python you'll get it down to fifteen minutes each, maybe. Now, I'm not going to claim that the command line is the only way to do these things (except for the last one). SQL or Excel or probably REXX would work too. But take advantage of the massive body of software that's already out there that can solve the 99% of your problems you have in common with everybody else, so you can spend your time mostly on the 1% that is your research.
- wfo 11y ago
  No, nobody, say, anticipated that I would try to upgrade Ubuntu while using Spotify. Otherwise it wouldn't have broken the app. Nobody anticipated that my friend would have upgraded to Windows 10 in whatever machine state he did it otherwise it would not have deleted and reset his user profile and all his permissions. Both these issues are unexpected and require handling on a deeper (commandline) level than 99% of uses, not because the users are trying to do something weird but because the systems are so complex that even normal use can lead to wildly unexpected situations. You can use the shortcuts and use GUIs and they are excellent and of course I use them as everyone does but if they are all you learn the moment anything unexpected happens (which happens a lot when you are using or building experimental software) you are dead in the water because you haven't developed a mental model of how your system actually works.
  - kragen 11y ago
    Hmm, I guess I see what you mean. I don't think that's mostly the kind of thing pgbovine was talking about, though. He was talking about the hurdles of getting to "hello, world", or whatever the equivalent is in terms of modifying some random piece of research software they've downloaded. Those hurdles are what cost his students productivity when they don't know how to navigate them, and how he teaches them to leap over them. Now, it's also true that when things break at one level of abstraction, you have to debug them at the next level of abstraction down, which means you have to understand that level of abstraction. But I don't think he's talking about that, because (among other things) that rarely has to do with the command line as such.

by wfo 11y ago

tormeh 11y ago

The command-line is also an abstraction. I'm not anti-command line (for non-user stuff), but it irks me that we see the command line as some kind of god-given fundamental bloc, rather than just another abstraction that just happen to be at a level most programmers are happy with. I think the command line will persist as long as keyboards are the primary data entry tool, but nothing makes the command line inherently less leaky than other interfaces.

wfo 11y ago
The command line isn't an abstraction: a particular shell is, sure. Directly inputting machine instructions is a form of a command line. At its most basic the computer is executing an ordered sequence of commands and you need a way to tell it to execute the commands you wish. Machines run on a sequence of function-argument instructions -- this is fundamentally what the command line is. I suppose you could invent a GUI that lets you click on the opcodes and memory addresses you want to execute but that's bordering on silly. It's always going to be very awkward to capture fundamental computation with a GUI unless the way the machines work changes in a big way. Every machine in existence has a command line interface. Some of them have GUIs built on top of that. Sounds pretty fundamental to me.
- tormeh 11y ago
  >Every machine in existence has a command line interface. No they don't. Embedded computers do not have command lines, for example. Embedded computers don't give a shit about text. Most computers do not accept commands at all. As for those who do, some don't accept it in text form, for example gaming consoles or punch-card antiquities. Command lines are the consequence of keyboards, and whenever you see a computer on which a keyboard cannot be attached or emulated (phones) then you're looking at a computer without a command line.
  - wfo 11y ago
    Okay, a trivial and meaningless nitpick but a technically accurate one. Every general purpose computing machine that you can interact with and reprogram can be done by command line. Sometimes you have to plug another machine and use ITS command line to send communications to the original machine. I'll agree with you that microwaves do not have command line interfaces but calling them "computers" is quite a stretch.
    - tormeh 11y ago
      No, it's not a meaningless nitpick! Yes, general purpose computers need to be programmed, but the reason we do it with a command line is because we prefer keyboards for data entry. When we stop using keyboards we will stop using command lines, just as we've stopped using punch cards. Everything that's not manually and physically setting voltages on memory is an abstraction. It's important to note that the command line is more an UI than an abstraction, though. Where the command line is on the abstraction level depends on implementation. Which one UI we use depends on convenience.
      - vacri 11y ago
        > Everything that's not manually and physically setting voltages on memory If you're going to be that pedantic, then you should go all the way and note that there are computers that have neither memory nor use electricity.
      - 11y ago

kragen 11y ago

I think you have it backwards. Someone has pre-anticipated 99% of everything you will ever do with a computer, no matter who you are. And if you don't take the time to learn the things that let you do these things in one minute flat each: comm -13 <(./foo | sort) <(sed 's/ //' < bar | sort ) > foos-not-in-bar awk 'BEGIN {while (getline < "/home/ubuntu/foo/bar" > 0) {sym[$1]=1}} ($2 in sym) {print $0}' sizes | sort -rn join -v2 <(cat ../foo ../bar | sort) <(sort ../baz) > quux zgrep -n " XYZ," /foo/bar.out.gz | awk '{print $0} END {print NR}' ./configure && make ...then you are going to spend an hour writing each one of them in Java or C++ or some nonsense like that and then debugging it. With Python you'll get it down to fifteen minutes each, maybe. Now, I'm not going to claim that the command line is the only way to do these things (except for the last one). SQL or Excel or probably REXX would work too. But take advantage of the massive body of software that's already out there that can solve the 99% of your problems you have in common with everybody else, so you can spend your time mostly on the 1% that is your research.

wfo 11y ago
No, nobody, say, anticipated that I would try to upgrade Ubuntu while using Spotify. Otherwise it wouldn't have broken the app. Nobody anticipated that my friend would have upgraded to Windows 10 in whatever machine state he did it otherwise it would not have deleted and reset his user profile and all his permissions. Both these issues are unexpected and require handling on a deeper (commandline) level than 99% of uses, not because the users are trying to do something weird but because the systems are so complex that even normal use can lead to wildly unexpected situations. You can use the shortcuts and use GUIs and they are excellent and of course I use them as everyone does but if they are all you learn the moment anything unexpected happens (which happens a lot when you are using or building experimental software) you are dead in the water because you haven't developed a mental model of how your system actually works.
- kragen 11y ago
  Hmm, I guess I see what you mean. I don't think that's mostly the kind of thing pgbovine was talking about, though. He was talking about the hurdles of getting to "hello, world", or whatever the equivalent is in terms of modifying some random piece of research software they've downloaded. Those hurdles are what cost his students productivity when they don't know how to navigate them, and how he teaches them to leap over them. Now, it's also true that when things break at one level of abstraction, you have to debug them at the next level of abstraction down, which means you have to understand that level of abstraction. But I don't think he's talking about that, because (among other things) that rarely has to do with the command line as such.