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That's a strong criticizm. There are a lot of equally valid linguistic ways to view the contents of a directory. But only one grammatical and lexical way to com
by toufka 10y ago
That's a strong criticizm. There are a lot of equally valid linguistic ways to view the contents of a directory. But only one grammatical and lexical way to command the computer to do it with text.
'Open folder', 'show contents', 'see items', why does 'ls' make more sense? It certainly has nothing to do with literacy.
- swiley 10y agoThe same can be said for GUIs though, look at how different mobile GUIs and desktop GUIs are. It's actually a real problem that people think their GUI is intuitive, they never end up documenting it. CLI app authors know this and are forced to face reality and at least write usage text.
- lmm 10y agoGUI tends to be more discoverable - in the worst case you can simply click through all the menus and see what all the available commands are. That tends not to be the case with a CLI - the man page requires a context switch and tends to go on for dozens of pages, some programs have good '--help' output but many do not.