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Ok. I'll bite. You're speaking from the perspective of someone locked into a way of doing work through the GUI, limiting your development experience to that of

Ok. I'll bite. You're speaking from the perspective of someone locked into a way of doing work through the GUI, limiting your development experience to that of what the GUI developer (MS in this case) has provided you. The CLI offers an infinitely combinable and customizable development experience, where huge ammounts of innovation have been occuring. You can see this in modern web development toolchains and new build tools for new languages, which simply would not happen if you restrict your Dev experience to just the GUI. I keep going back to just creating Makefiles for simple automation tasks. Even the GUIs are starting to learn from this, which is why I think VSCode and Atom are becoming popular; they make it very simple to integrate new CLI tools into the GUIs workflow.

coldtea 10y ago
>Ok. I'll bite. You're speaking from the perspective of someone locked into a way of doing work through the GUI, limiting your development experience to that of what the GUI developer (MS in this case) has provided you. No, I'm speaking from the perspective of someone that has worked in the old days with Sun OS (pre-Solaris) workstations and HP-UX machines, has used (for years) actual VT102 terminals, started using Linux distros around '97 and has been using the CLI in various forms since the mid-eighties or so. There's nothing limited about the GUI (in theory, and, for most things that matter, in practice too). For example a visual flow language (think Automator in OS X or Quartz Composer, etc) can achieve all the "configurable pipeline" stuff people like in the CLI in a more controlled and formal way. I also dislike the "dynamic typing" (everything is text/bytes) in the CLI, and would prefer something like PowerShell to have been the norm (with the accompanying toolset). Also note that there's nothing about the GUI that prevents someone from typing some commands too -- and in fact that's part of how lots of GUIs work. Also, I wouldn't point to "modern web development toolchains" as something to advertise CLIs -- what would that be, Gulp, Grunt, Webpack and the like? All crufty solutions to inadequacies in steering the underlying language properly. Even in theory, CLIs are not inherently more powerful, it's the other way around (they lack a dimension that GUIs offer (graphics) -- GUIs on the other hand don't lack any dimension -- they can incorporate text commands and text fields and pipelines just fine.

coldtea 10y ago

>Ok. I'll bite. You're speaking from the perspective of someone locked into a way of doing work through the GUI, limiting your development experience to that of what the GUI developer (MS in this case) has provided you. No, I'm speaking from the perspective of someone that has worked in the old days with Sun OS (pre-Solaris) workstations and HP-UX machines, has used (for years) actual VT102 terminals, started using Linux distros around '97 and has been using the CLI in various forms since the mid-eighties or so. There's nothing limited about the GUI (in theory, and, for most things that matter, in practice too). For example a visual flow language (think Automator in OS X or Quartz Composer, etc) can achieve all the "configurable pipeline" stuff people like in the CLI in a more controlled and formal way. I also dislike the "dynamic typing" (everything is text/bytes) in the CLI, and would prefer something like PowerShell to have been the norm (with the accompanying toolset). Also note that there's nothing about the GUI that prevents someone from typing some commands too -- and in fact that's part of how lots of GUIs work. Also, I wouldn't point to "modern web development toolchains" as something to advertise CLIs -- what would that be, Gulp, Grunt, Webpack and the like? All crufty solutions to inadequacies in steering the underlying language properly. Even in theory, CLIs are not inherently more powerful, it's the other way around (they lack a dimension that GUIs offer (graphics) -- GUIs on the other hand don't lack any dimension -- they can incorporate text commands and text fields and pipelines just fine.