3 ms·

Fascinating to see how much information you can extract from text files and terminal commands (+ lots of piping). Makes you wonder how efficient GUIs really are

by jaflo 11y ago

Fascinating to see how much information you can extract from text files and terminal commands (+ lots of piping). Makes you wonder how efficient GUIs really are for data analysis.

minimaxir 11y ago
Using terminal commands (w/ "lots of piping") for reproducable analysis that you intend to show to others is not recommended. More importantly, it increases the chance of making a mistake. There's nothing wrong with GUIs for statistical analysis.
- genericpseudo 11y ago
  I disagree, sort of, a little bit. If I'm writing a shell pipeline for data analysis, I rewrite it as a Makefile. Make is a great tool for this sort of thing. (Use whatever works as long as it's a single command to reproducibly rerun an analysis.)
qwerty_asdf 11y ago
GUIs are there to distribute choices and permissible actions across a Cartesian plane, so that you can glance at a field of view, and quickly pick the thing you'd like to do right now, from a memorable/legible spatial arrangement. The reason we benefit from GUIs is the same reason we benefit from our predatory binocular vision. A hunter that can see its prey can home in on a target quickly. Terminal commands are a completely different strategy. Terminal commands only become intuitive, once you memorized chains of commands, and learned their interchangability. Terminal commands gain practicality through practice, like knowing where all your home's light switches are in the dark. After you've lived there for a while, your hands move to them involuntarily, when you get up in the middle of night for a glass of water. But try the same thing in a hotel room. All of this rides on top of a layer of muscle memory, but it's an order of magnitude more advanced, and decoupled. In league with playing an instrument, stenography and taking letters by dictation, that sort of thing. It's all blind and sightless.

by jaflo 11y ago

Fascinating to see how much information you can extract from text files and terminal commands (+ lots of piping). Makes you wonder how efficient GUIs really are for data analysis.

minimaxir 11y ago

Using terminal commands (w/ "lots of piping") for reproducable analysis that you intend to show to others is not recommended. More importantly, it increases the chance of making a mistake. There's nothing wrong with GUIs for statistical analysis.

genericpseudo 11y ago
I disagree, sort of, a little bit. If I'm writing a shell pipeline for data analysis, I rewrite it as a Makefile. Make is a great tool for this sort of thing. (Use whatever works as long as it's a single command to reproducibly rerun an analysis.)

qwerty_asdf 11y ago

GUIs are there to distribute choices and permissible actions across a Cartesian plane, so that you can glance at a field of view, and quickly pick the thing you'd like to do right now, from a memorable/legible spatial arrangement. The reason we benefit from GUIs is the same reason we benefit from our predatory binocular vision. A hunter that can see its prey can home in on a target quickly. Terminal commands are a completely different strategy. Terminal commands only become intuitive, once you memorized chains of commands, and learned their interchangability. Terminal commands gain practicality through practice, like knowing where all your home's light switches are in the dark. After you've lived there for a while, your hands move to them involuntarily, when you get up in the middle of night for a glass of water. But try the same thing in a hotel room. All of this rides on top of a layer of muscle memory, but it's an order of magnitude more advanced, and decoupled. In league with playing an instrument, stenography and taking letters by dictation, that sort of thing. It's all blind and sightless.