6 ms·

GUIs are about showing what you can do. CLIs are about memorizing what you can do. One suits computers and the tiny amount of population with aspergers, the o

GUIs are about showing what you can do. CLIs are about memorizing what you can do. One suits computers and the tiny amount of population with aspergers, the other suits normal people.

kafkaesq 10y ago
The tasks I was referring to are clearly developer-centric tasks. Applications for "normal people" are an entirely different animal of course.
- flukus 10y ago
  Kind of funny that we have initiatives like "everyone should be a programmer" but then we don't even trust "normal people" to learn how to use a CLI.
  - kafkaesq 10y ago
    I think the key distinction is between different kinds of tasks (and importantly, the scale on which those tasks are done) rather than different kinds of people.
- mattmanser 10y ago
  I'm a developer and a normal person. CLIs are idiotic. Why can't you just click a button and be done, certainly not sit there and spend 20 minutes figuring out what the fuck -g means or if knockut-sortable is missing an o. It's utterly ridiculous that you're discussing this and just shows how many of you are utterly brainwashed by utterly useless trivia that your computer should be memorising for you but your fellow programmers are too lazy to implement GUIs for. I honestly can't comprehend that you so gleefully spend your time so pointlessly, you should be spending your brains on solving actual life and business problems, not memorising the syntax of CLIs you'll use once every 3 months, or worse still, never again, or virtually useless regex syntax.
  - Dobbs 10y ago
    I'm a developer, and an ex-sysadmin. Using the CLI makes my life much simpler. I greatly prefer being able to write scripts, and use things like PDSH to run commands across many boxes. For example, go through every web server, search their logs for occurrences of IP X and then count the number the number of requests per second. Is this something I do every day, nope, but the basics of doing it are the same as the basics of so many other things that I do that there is no issue memorizing the commands. Using guis and managing a server without a CLI is a very annoying situation. There are other things where using a GUI is way nicer, like complicated partial git commits. Also thanks for informing me that I have aspergers, guess I'll have to go have a doctor check that out ;)
  - seanyeh 10y ago
    How you can tell someone is perfectly normal: they will tell you they are normal. On the topic, some GUIs are idiotic. A command takes a second to type, but a complicated GUI may take multiple buttons, menus, etc. that take almost forever to navigate.
  - greenshackle2 10y ago
    The day when gui applications have anywhere near the composability of cli applications, I'll think about it. > I'm a developer > useless regex I don't know what kind of developing you do but regexes are massively useful if you do any sort of string handling or input checking. > CLIs you'll use once every 3 months Funny, I spend 90% of my time in a CLI. I don't spend my time memorizing stuff, the commands I use frequently are committed to muscle memory, the rest I look up. If you spend time with the CLI you learn to look stuff up not too inefficiently. Looking for a menu entry in a GUI is more painful to me than reading/grepping a man page. Sounds like you really hate CLIs, I hope you don't have to use them too often, there's no reason why everyone has to use them, but I promise you, there are hundreds of thousands if not millions of productive CLI users out there.
  - flukus 10y ago
    > Why can't you just click a button and be done Because there isn't a button to just do everything I want to do and if there was I'd have to find it amongst a million buttons.
mattnewton 10y ago
CLI's are automatable and scriptable in ways we still haven't achieved with GUIs. They are also usually easier to write and to maintain. There are many, many more reasons too.
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jarman 10y ago
>CLIs are about memorizing CMD --help man CMD Tab competition Command line history search
lozf 10y ago
FLAC developer Josh Coalson made the point well: [QUOTE] ... to me, GUIs are like a caveman language where you have to grunt (click) and wave your hands (mouse) at the computer until it does what you want. (imagine the mouse pointer as your hand, then say "ugh" every time you click to mean "ME WANT THAT".) if whoever wrote the gui didn't add a feature that you can specifically communicate with an exact grunt and wave sequence, you're out of luck and have to ask the developer to add that. Shell scripting is like spoken language, a much more natural and powerful way to communicate what you want to do. instead of every developer having to reimplement functionality for crawling a tree and doing something, one guy just writes the 'find' command and it's usable in conjunctions with other commands. [/QUOTE] source: https://hydrogenaud.io/index.php?PHPSESSID=ae25885agmimsrj7679bk3ch85&topic=52757.msg472411#msg472411 https://hydrogenaud.io/index.php?PHPSESSID=ae25885agmimsrj76...
- chriswarbo 10y ago
  I'm not sure where the "point and grunt" analogy came from, but I first read it from Eben Moglen. I can't remember where, but there are lots of examples floating around, e.g. at http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/1/i_moglen_1.php http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/1/i_moglen_1.php > In 1979, when I was working at IBM, I wrote an internal memo lambasting the Apple Lisa, which was Apple`s first attempt to adapt Xerox PARC technology, the graphical user interface, into a desktop PC. I was then working on the development of APL2, a nested array, algorithmic, symbolic language, and I was committed to the idea that what we were doing with computers was making languages that were better than natural languages for procedural thought. The idea was to do for whole ranges of human thinking what mathematics has been doing for thousands of years in the quantitative arrangement of knowledge, and to help people think in more precise and clear ways. What I saw in the Xerox PARC technology was the caveman interface, you point and you grunt. A massive winding down, regressing away from language, in order to address the technological nervousness of the user. Users wanted to be infantilized, to return to a pre-linguistic condition in the using of computers, and the Xerox PARC technology`s primary advantage was that it allowed users to address computers in a pre-linguistic way. This was to my mind a terribly socially retrograde thing to do, and I have not changed my mind about that. I lost that war in the early 1980s, went to law school, got a history PHD, did other things, because the fundamental turn in the technology - which we see represented in its most technologically degenerate form, which is Windows, the really crippled version. I mean, I use Xwindows every day on my free-software PCs; I have nothing against a windowing environment, but it`s a windowing environment which is network transparent and which is based around the fact that inside every window there`s some dialogue to have with some linguistic entity.

GUIs are about showing what you can do. CLIs are about memorizing what you can do. One suits computers and the tiny amount of population with aspergers, the other suits normal people.

kafkaesq 10y ago

The tasks I was referring to are clearly developer-centric tasks. Applications for "normal people" are an entirely different animal of course.

flukus 10y ago
Kind of funny that we have initiatives like "everyone should be a programmer" but then we don't even trust "normal people" to learn how to use a CLI.
- kafkaesq 10y ago
  I think the key distinction is between different kinds of tasks (and importantly, the scale on which those tasks are done) rather than different kinds of people.
mattmanser 10y ago
I'm a developer and a normal person. CLIs are idiotic. Why can't you just click a button and be done, certainly not sit there and spend 20 minutes figuring out what the fuck -g means or if knockut-sortable is missing an o. It's utterly ridiculous that you're discussing this and just shows how many of you are utterly brainwashed by utterly useless trivia that your computer should be memorising for you but your fellow programmers are too lazy to implement GUIs for. I honestly can't comprehend that you so gleefully spend your time so pointlessly, you should be spending your brains on solving actual life and business problems, not memorising the syntax of CLIs you'll use once every 3 months, or worse still, never again, or virtually useless regex syntax.
- Dobbs 10y ago
  I'm a developer, and an ex-sysadmin. Using the CLI makes my life much simpler. I greatly prefer being able to write scripts, and use things like PDSH to run commands across many boxes. For example, go through every web server, search their logs for occurrences of IP X and then count the number the number of requests per second. Is this something I do every day, nope, but the basics of doing it are the same as the basics of so many other things that I do that there is no issue memorizing the commands. Using guis and managing a server without a CLI is a very annoying situation. There are other things where using a GUI is way nicer, like complicated partial git commits. Also thanks for informing me that I have aspergers, guess I'll have to go have a doctor check that out ;)
- seanyeh 10y ago
  How you can tell someone is perfectly normal: they will tell you they are normal. On the topic, some GUIs are idiotic. A command takes a second to type, but a complicated GUI may take multiple buttons, menus, etc. that take almost forever to navigate.
- greenshackle2 10y ago
  The day when gui applications have anywhere near the composability of cli applications, I'll think about it. > I'm a developer > useless regex I don't know what kind of developing you do but regexes are massively useful if you do any sort of string handling or input checking. > CLIs you'll use once every 3 months Funny, I spend 90% of my time in a CLI. I don't spend my time memorizing stuff, the commands I use frequently are committed to muscle memory, the rest I look up. If you spend time with the CLI you learn to look stuff up not too inefficiently. Looking for a menu entry in a GUI is more painful to me than reading/grepping a man page. Sounds like you really hate CLIs, I hope you don't have to use them too often, there's no reason why everyone has to use them, but I promise you, there are hundreds of thousands if not millions of productive CLI users out there.
- flukus 10y ago
  > Why can't you just click a button and be done Because there isn't a button to just do everything I want to do and if there was I'd have to find it amongst a million buttons.

mattnewton 10y ago

CLI's are automatable and scriptable in ways we still haven't achieved with GUIs. They are also usually easier to write and to maintain. There are many, many more reasons too.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

jarman 10y ago

>CLIs are about memorizing CMD --help man CMD Tab competition Command line history search

lozf 10y ago

FLAC developer Josh Coalson made the point well: [QUOTE] ... to me, GUIs are like a caveman language where you have to grunt (click) and wave your hands (mouse) at the computer until it does what you want. (imagine the mouse pointer as your hand, then say "ugh" every time you click to mean "ME WANT THAT".) if whoever wrote the gui didn't add a feature that you can specifically communicate with an exact grunt and wave sequence, you're out of luck and have to ask the developer to add that. Shell scripting is like spoken language, a much more natural and powerful way to communicate what you want to do. instead of every developer having to reimplement functionality for crawling a tree and doing something, one guy just writes the 'find' command and it's usable in conjunctions with other commands. [/QUOTE] source: https://hydrogenaud.io/index.php?PHPSESSID=ae25885agmimsrj7679bk3ch85&topic=52757.msg472411#msg472411 https://hydrogenaud.io/index.php?PHPSESSID=ae25885agmimsrj76...

chriswarbo 10y ago
I'm not sure where the "point and grunt" analogy came from, but I first read it from Eben Moglen. I can't remember where, but there are lots of examples floating around, e.g. at http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/1/i_moglen_1.php http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/1/i_moglen_1.php > In 1979, when I was working at IBM, I wrote an internal memo lambasting the Apple Lisa, which was Apple`s first attempt to adapt Xerox PARC technology, the graphical user interface, into a desktop PC. I was then working on the development of APL2, a nested array, algorithmic, symbolic language, and I was committed to the idea that what we were doing with computers was making languages that were better than natural languages for procedural thought. The idea was to do for whole ranges of human thinking what mathematics has been doing for thousands of years in the quantitative arrangement of knowledge, and to help people think in more precise and clear ways. What I saw in the Xerox PARC technology was the caveman interface, you point and you grunt. A massive winding down, regressing away from language, in order to address the technological nervousness of the user. Users wanted to be infantilized, to return to a pre-linguistic condition in the using of computers, and the Xerox PARC technology`s primary advantage was that it allowed users to address computers in a pre-linguistic way. This was to my mind a terribly socially retrograde thing to do, and I have not changed my mind about that. I lost that war in the early 1980s, went to law school, got a history PHD, did other things, because the fundamental turn in the technology - which we see represented in its most technologically degenerate form, which is Windows, the really crippled version. I mean, I use Xwindows every day on my free-software PCs; I have nothing against a windowing environment, but it`s a windowing environment which is network transparent and which is based around the fact that inside every window there`s some dialogue to have with some linguistic entity.