Eh, beware overgeneralization from your specific context. I've been working in the Rails/OSS world for the last 5 years or so, and I agree that in this context,

Eh, beware overgeneralization from your specific context. I've been working in the Rails/OSS world for the last 5 years or so, and I agree that in this context, someone claiming dislike of CLIs would give me pause. However, I spent a decade working in .NET on Windows – mostly before PowerShell became popular/usable. A lot of good, experienced programmers in that space rarely used a CLI. I personally had some batch scripts that I used often, but for most people on my team, the CLI was just used for infrequent admin tasks, e.g., debugging a networking issue, restarting IIS, etc. No part of the daily programming workflow depended on a CLI. I've also worked around some iOS developers, and their workflow seemed similar in that most of them rarely used the terminal for anything beyond infrequent admin tasks or maybe version control. So yeah, I live in the shell, and it's hard to imagine anyone working in Ruby (or Python or server-side JS) for long without heavy CLI usage. I love the power and composability of the command line, but I also understand that not everyone does and not everyone needs to. Edit: This might be a flawed analogy, but my feelings on this are similar to my feelings on an IDE vs a text editor. I've become a somewhat passionate vim user, but I wouldn't negatively judge a .NET developer for using Visual Studio nor an iOS developer for using Xcode.