Typing wasn't the hard part of using shells, either, and yet GUIs have displaced them for many classes of users. One of the very hard parts is "knowing what thi

Typing wasn't the hard part of using shells, either, and yet GUIs have displaced them for many classes of users. One of the very hard parts is "knowing what things you can type." GUIs solved that problem for UI much better than shells did -- it was much easier to discover what the computer could do in an early GUI. A good visual programming language (not that I've seen one yet) could bring similar discoverability to programming.