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As someone who didn't grow up with systems like that, I really wish I had. I was never really introduced to programming until high school, but I feel like I wou

As someone who didn't grow up with systems like that, I really wish I had. I was never really introduced to programming until high school, but I feel like I would've loved it at a younger age. GUIs are nice in many ways, but in general they seem to encourage consumption much more than they do creation. I feel like there has to be some way to build a GUI with the same kind of expressiveness as those early PCs, but I don't know how.

digi_owl 9y ago
I recall seeing some big name in the computing world calling GUIs point-and-drool interfaces. And i can't help wonder if we ended up in this situation because the DOS CLI sucked, and the Mac didn't have a CLI at all. Thus anyone exposed to home computing back in the day things CLI is something nasty and borderline useless, and this mentality has transfered over to desktop _nix, where the CLI is quite the potent interface. Thus we have big name DE projects trying to insulate the users from the CLI, and coming up with ever more elaborate schemes of daemons and protocols to do what a few quick commands in a virtual terminal could solve. Yet time and again we see that the power-users and similar reject these elaborate GUIs and their plumbing for simple tiling WMs on top of an X11 session started from a CLI login to run a pile of virtual terminals (and the odd web browser).
- ams6110 9y ago
  The DOS CLI didn't really suck any worse than the CLI of contemporary machines such as Apple ][ or Commodore or TRS-80.