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"inconsistent and complex flows to do some non-trivial things" Note that's a characteristic of bad design, not a characteristic of CLIs, where constraining the

by VLM 9y ago

"inconsistent and complex flows to do some non-trivial things" Note that's a characteristic of bad design, not a characteristic of CLIs, where constraining the UI to GUI, will merely result in a hard to use GUI, instead of a hard to use CLI. Note that in an email or printed page I can provide any CLI walkthru and anyone can follow with minimal training ("Which key is the any key?"), but some purely graphical GUIs are impossible to discuss verbally, especially if badly designed (see above, and realize the badly designed ones are going to need the most help). First, click on the icon that looks like a Rhinotia hemistictus nose, except its green. No, not that, thats more of a myrtle color, you want the really bright green one. OK, now if you see a screen that looks like a Type II Seyfert galaxy then you've clicked thru too far and need to click back. Oh no, there's no left arrow icon to go back, we outsourced development to save money and in the programmer's culture a left arrow is an obscene gesture indicating you mate with your sibling, so our discount software uses a thoracic vertebrae, superior side up, for its back icon, isn't that hilarious a "back bone" to go back oh those UX guys crack me up every time. Something thats one line at a shell interface that could have been cut and pasted in, can involve an hour of talking back and forth about a bad GUI.

flukus 9y ago
There's a reason most desktop support still rely on the command line in the windows start menu.
jakub_g 9y ago
> "inconsistent and complex flows to do some non-trivial things" > Note that's a characteristic of bad design, not a characteristic of CLIs That's a characteristic of hundreds of developers creating features over dozens of years, and those features interacting with each other in subtle ways. In my experience, even in small projects and codebases things get notoriously inconsistent very fast. It's a hard thing to keep, as it requires conscious effort and most developers don't care that much. And once something goes to production (or far enough in non-regression phase), it's a game over. On top of that, AFAIU, in legacy systems, storage space was severely limited. Hence PNRs had a rigid structure that was not very extensible. That's another fact due to which implementing new features in a backward-compatible way might have been cumbersome.

by VLM 9y ago

flukus 9y ago

There's a reason most desktop support still rely on the command line in the windows start menu.

jakub_g 9y ago

> "inconsistent and complex flows to do some non-trivial things" > Note that's a characteristic of bad design, not a characteristic of CLIs That's a characteristic of hundreds of developers creating features over dozens of years, and those features interacting with each other in subtle ways. In my experience, even in small projects and codebases things get notoriously inconsistent very fast. It's a hard thing to keep, as it requires conscious effort and most developers don't care that much. And once something goes to production (or far enough in non-regression phase), it's a game over. On top of that, AFAIU, in legacy systems, storage space was severely limited. Hence PNRs had a rigid structure that was not very extensible. That's another fact due to which implementing new features in a backward-compatible way might have been cumbersome.