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I had sort of an "aha" moment reading a non-technical co-workers conversation on Slack the other day. Someone built a Slackbot to show the menu for whatever foo

I had sort of an "aha" moment reading a non-technical co-workers conversation on Slack the other day. Someone built a Slackbot to show the menu for whatever food truck is outside our building that day, and people could use it just by typing "/foodtruck". They were blown away and loved it. Rather than opening a browser and navigating some disparate menu pages, they could simply fire off a command in their "console". I realized that people love Slack because it has introduced them to the CLI paradigm of computing for the first time. CLI is so much more efficient and powerful if users can somehow be incentivized to put in the time and effort to become productive, which Slack has focused on a lot. As inefficient and silly as it may seem to us developers, Slack with it's endless command based integrations has succeed wildly at that where nothing else has so far.

ericpsimon 8y ago
Has Slack innovated in the last 5 years?
- j88439h84 8y ago
  I dunno. Do you think that's important? Why?
  - theelous3 8y ago
    Buggy mobile client (andriod) and dumpster tier performance are two areas they have been dropping the ball on since release, and requires innovation in some sense of the word. Those are both very important. Innovation is generally important and I'm half curious as to why you ask.
    - boomlinde 8y ago
      > Buggy mobile client (andriod) and dumpster tier performance are two areas they have been dropping the ball on since release, and requires innovation in some sense of the word. Making your program meet what really should be a minimum acceptable standard is considered innovation now? Multimedia chat clients that performed well and weren't crippled by bugs existed in the 90s. > Those are both very important. Innovation is generally important and I'm half curious as to why you ask. Has Slack's attraction ever been that it's an innovative product? My understanding is that it's all about convenience. It's like IRC+bouncer with some shiny things and without the hassle.
      - theelous3 8y ago
        > Has Slack's attraction ever been that it's an innovative product? Yeah, it's just IRC with a new hat, but sure, I'm willing to say it was innovative. Nothing like it existed and now many things like it exist. It was an innovation in the smaller parts - that judging by how things have gone, are maybe not so small. > Making your program meet what really should be a minimum acceptable standard is considered innovation now? It's not ~disruptive techmologi~ but it would require genuine innovation in terms of creating a proper cross platform native UI framework, or at the very lest a large shift in their product to move to multiple frameworks (innovation in the company rather than in tech generally.)
kovek 8y ago
I remember on Hipchat you could edit your last message by sending a message using this (sed?) syntax: s/flock/duck/ . I remember hearing someone saying that was the worst design they've seen in their life. I almost agree. I do agree that text interfaces are better. I really wish that more products were exposed through a purely textual interface. I think hipchat could have solved the issue with a text interfaces better. Also, this is why I really like Emacs. It has a great library for creating text interfaces. I had trouble with it because it is written in elisp/lisp.
- laumars 8y ago
  Skype supports the regex s/search/replace/ notation as well. Which threw me off guard one evening.
  - MrEldritch 8y ago
    Discord too.
  - TeMPOraL 8y ago
    Does it? I know it did 7 years ago on Linux clients, but AFAIR it doesn't now. It's definitely the feature I missed the most on Windows client.
    - laumars 8y ago
      Last time I used that feature was probably a couple of years ago (also on Linux). But I've not used Skype much (if at all) in the last 12 months so maybe things have changed since then?
- xyzzy_plugh 8y ago
  I don't think the sed syntax was implemented in an effort to make a good interface; rather, they simply implemented what many (albeit technical) users have been writing for years. I've been using sed-like notation to chat with colleagues for years. HipChat just chose to do something about it. I believe you could also edit your last message with the mouse, or by pressing "up" (but I don't remember if that was opt-in).
buchanae 8y ago
I remember being giddy about the potential of Ubiquity to bring the CLI to a wider audience, and bring more power to existing CLI users. Too bad it never played out. https://wiki.mozilla.org/Labs/Ubiquity https://wiki.mozilla.org/Labs/Ubiquity
- chocolatebunny 8y ago
  That kind of stuff comes up every so often. I heard rumors in the early 2000s about Microsoft implementing a version of Office that was more commandline oriented (this was when people were getting sick of their "smart" menubar, before the ribbon interface).
  - ghthor 8y ago
    My partner is a lawyer and we both agree that the rich text editors are massively killing productivity in the space, where plain text is PLENTY powerful enough. The dumb shit they deal with documents and formatting and PDF's. It's fucking dumb, plain text & markdown for life.
sxates 8y ago
Problem is it doesn't scale well for people. Imagine if everything you did in slack was via CLI - there are dozens, hundreds of commands to learn? Imagine if every app had dozens of commands you had to learn and memorize. Sure you could do it and be blazing fast, but that's a really steep learning curve a lot of users wouldn't adopt.
- sjmulder 8y ago
  What you need then is a compact overview of what is available, like `man intro`, and something like `apropos`.
- chris_mc 8y ago
  Look at the VSCODE command bar. You start to type what you want to do, and the search function is incredible, helping you find any command you want. Why couldn't something simple like that be applied to the command line interface for a shell maybe? Heck, with `zsh` I have a lot of autocomplete commands available, including several sub-commands and sub-sub commands. For example, when I type `git remote <tab>`, a listing shows all of the possible commands, such as `add` or whatever. Just make the console smarter, _with good algorithms that aren't slow_, and people would use it a lot more.
  - seanmcdirmid 8y ago
    Isn’t that just apropos?
  - westoncb 8y ago
    I've been wondering this for years. It seems like the most obvious way to greatly improve CLIs, yet no one seems to talk about it...
    - sorahn 8y ago
      Check out Fish Shell.
      - 8y ago
cortesoft 8y ago
In a lot of ways, chatops is even better than a CLI. It basically can turn a channel into a shared terminal, with history, search, and the ability to comment
- chocolatebunny 8y ago
  Reminds me of a former coworker's Emacs workflow. He organized his work in orgmode. He used emacs for email, jabber, and irc. He would copy paste new tasks between email and orgmode, and he could copy paste the code snippets he was working on to irc if he needed help.
  - erikbye 8y ago
    He'd get a lot of flack unless he gisted his snippet first. But, of course, we have gist.el.
    - TeMPOraL 8y ago
      This can be, and probably is, automatically targeted by some simple pre-send hook. Basically, if you're trying to send >4 lines, automatically gist them and send URL instead.
    - theelous3 8y ago
      Shout out to termbin for being a useable and simple cli option here.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- 0x445442 8y ago
  And display hypermedia.
ssivark 8y ago
Most successful interactions with Siri/Alexa/Cortana/GoogleNow also fall under the same paradigm. They have some finite number of templates/recipes that they can respond to, and just enough "NLP" to attempt a fuzzy matching between what you ask for, and the triggers to the recipes. The key point is that communication is fundamentally serial, in both voice and basic text consoles, whereas GUIs allow parallel communication streams (and hence "exploration") organized spatially. I find it ironic how the same people consider GUIs a more newbie friendly interaction paradigm than the terminal/console, and then say the same for voice interfaces over GUIs.
- digi_owl 8y ago
  https://www.osnews.com/story/6282 https://www.osnews.com/story/6282
- protomyth 8y ago
  It makes on wonder if an Infocom-style VM could be adapted for CLI use. They did have a database as I recall.
- sharmi 8y ago
  Maybe because, the cli mode means, you need to remember the commands? In GUI mode, though inefficient, you know exactly where to access help and a few basic params (like dropdown menu on top, usually save under file, cut and copy under edit) that smoothens the learning curve. They have some solid ground from which to start exploring. Whereas under console mode, there is no unifying paradigm. So each tool has a different way of doing the same thing. There is a lot of inertia at the start. Like what command is it for help 'h' or 'h?' or 'help' or 'H' ? What command is it for quit 'q' or 'quit' or 'ctrl+d' or 'ctrl+c' or 'bye' ? For example, in gmail, I expected archive to be 'a' and delete to be 'd' or atleast "DEL". Very basic operations and basic expectations. Turns out, archive is '#' and delete is some char I can't remember now (I think '{' and '}' to indicate whether to go to the previous mail or the next mail. A 'd' to go to next mail and a 'D' to go to previous email would have been a lot more intuitive). Of course, you can customize the key bindings, but then you got to go do it across all your accounts. While people may be quite happy to be able to wield so much power within the slack environment, they are very quickly going to lose their enthusiasm with the introduction of each new console tool, unless what they have learned in the slack environment translates into easier learning curve in the next console env. Basically for users to be able to adopt the console mode, there is should be some sort of standardization.
swerveonem 8y ago
It's the rediscovery of mIRC like interaction workflows.
- digi_owl 8y ago
  IRC... But yes, Slack is basically IRC with a built in bouncer. And i case people wonder, a bouncer or BNC, was a personal proxy that would be running on some server somewhere, and that maintained a presence on the IRC networks for you when you logged off. And when you logged back on, you got a log of all the traffic on the relevant channels and direct messages while you were gone.
  - collinmanderson 8y ago
    Yes. This is why slack has been more successful than irc.
- 0x445442 8y ago
  Got most of my music through mIRC :p
Avshalom 8y ago
in cases like that how can you distinguish loving the cli paradigm and loving some one else doing the work for them
wruza 8y ago
You may check telegram’s games, services and other bots that allow to manage your entire world via chat (with programmatic buttons and menus to ease /cmds a little). I don’t use it much, but my coworker said that he almost lives there, visiting sites only for long, static content. From this perspective, “we” don’t “need” as the article says, since it’s already there and writing a simple bot is a no-brainer. (Downsides of proprietary protocol are obvious.)
- skewart 8y ago
  Genuinely curious, why don't you use it much?
  - wruza 8y ago
    I’m not really into social games in my language (maybe should try english areas). Anyway, discoverability is a hard part of telegram. Like you don’t see tg-links on the internet often. For bots part I just didn’t go there yet – no particular need. I’ve written two utility bots for my company though.
0x445442 8y ago
Ding, ding, ding!!! I've been beating this drum for a few years now. The interesting thing about chat bots is the UI not natural language processing. I think people are completely overwhelmed by the massive lack of consistent UI the Web has brought us. I also think the more "apps" that could be brought into platforms like Telegram, the happier users would be. There's also evidence of this in China where 100's of millions of people use WeChat for a large percentage of their needs.
- jstarfish 8y ago
  Really? It seems that with the advent of Bootstrap and responsive design, website UIs are more consistent and generic than ever before. Every corporate landing page is a jumbotron/full-width image, followed by three columns of bullshit, followed by a few rows of random glyphicons and more vague nonsense to cross the minimum text SEO threshold, and a footer. The early internet was a much wilder place. Frames or no frames? Tables for layout or not? Dare we use an imagemap? Fuck it, let's do the whole thing in Flash. It was chaos. Now, one thing that has also come to pass is websites with straight up cryptic UIs. Buttons no longer have labels. We have hamburgers and hieroglyphs. I think that might be more of a driving frustration.
  - 0x445442 8y ago
    I'd agree with you when you're talking about websites that are, for the most part static and just conveying information. But when you're talking about actual web applications designed to get work done I think things are wildly disjointed. If I were to show you the web apps I interact with regularly, both personally and professionally, you'd see what I'm talking about.
    - jstarfish 8y ago
      Fair enough. I had not considered apps :)
- collinmanderson 8y ago
  I realize it’s called “WeChat”, but isn’t it super popular because all of the mini UI-driven apps inside of it? I don’t get the impression that people really talking to bots much using that app. They’re either chatting with humans or interacting with UIs. http://a16z.com/2015/08/06/wechat-china-mobile-first/ http://a16z.com/2015/08/06/wechat-china-mobile-first/
Tagbert 8y ago
CLIs work well when the universe of commands is small or the user is very familiar with the application. Discoverability suffers, even with man pages. Where a GUI helps is for the casual user who needs help understanding the options. An interface that can allow both styles of interaction has the flexibility to give both kinds of users what they need.
Kagerjay 8y ago
Thats the same way with architectural CAD design programs like AutoCAD You can do things with the toolbars but every competent architect relies on CLI tools instead for common things like "move" , "scale", "copy", etc I've never considered slack as a CLI tool for the masses this is a great analogy. I should do more research on existing slackbots

ericpsimon 8y ago

Has Slack innovated in the last 5 years?

j88439h84 8y ago
I dunno. Do you think that's important? Why?
- theelous3 8y ago
  Buggy mobile client (andriod) and dumpster tier performance are two areas they have been dropping the ball on since release, and requires innovation in some sense of the word. Those are both very important. Innovation is generally important and I'm half curious as to why you ask.
  - boomlinde 8y ago
    > Buggy mobile client (andriod) and dumpster tier performance are two areas they have been dropping the ball on since release, and requires innovation in some sense of the word. Making your program meet what really should be a minimum acceptable standard is considered innovation now? Multimedia chat clients that performed well and weren't crippled by bugs existed in the 90s. > Those are both very important. Innovation is generally important and I'm half curious as to why you ask. Has Slack's attraction ever been that it's an innovative product? My understanding is that it's all about convenience. It's like IRC+bouncer with some shiny things and without the hassle.
    - theelous3 8y ago
      > Has Slack's attraction ever been that it's an innovative product? Yeah, it's just IRC with a new hat, but sure, I'm willing to say it was innovative. Nothing like it existed and now many things like it exist. It was an innovation in the smaller parts - that judging by how things have gone, are maybe not so small. > Making your program meet what really should be a minimum acceptable standard is considered innovation now? It's not ~disruptive techmologi~ but it would require genuine innovation in terms of creating a proper cross platform native UI framework, or at the very lest a large shift in their product to move to multiple frameworks (innovation in the company rather than in tech generally.)

kovek 8y ago

I remember on Hipchat you could edit your last message by sending a message using this (sed?) syntax: s/flock/duck/ . I remember hearing someone saying that was the worst design they've seen in their life. I almost agree. I do agree that text interfaces are better. I really wish that more products were exposed through a purely textual interface. I think hipchat could have solved the issue with a text interfaces better. Also, this is why I really like Emacs. It has a great library for creating text interfaces. I had trouble with it because it is written in elisp/lisp.

laumars 8y ago
Skype supports the regex s/search/replace/ notation as well. Which threw me off guard one evening.
- MrEldritch 8y ago
  Discord too.
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  Does it? I know it did 7 years ago on Linux clients, but AFAIR it doesn't now. It's definitely the feature I missed the most on Windows client.
  - laumars 8y ago
    Last time I used that feature was probably a couple of years ago (also on Linux). But I've not used Skype much (if at all) in the last 12 months so maybe things have changed since then?
xyzzy_plugh 8y ago
I don't think the sed syntax was implemented in an effort to make a good interface; rather, they simply implemented what many (albeit technical) users have been writing for years. I've been using sed-like notation to chat with colleagues for years. HipChat just chose to do something about it. I believe you could also edit your last message with the mouse, or by pressing "up" (but I don't remember if that was opt-in).

buchanae 8y ago

I remember being giddy about the potential of Ubiquity to bring the CLI to a wider audience, and bring more power to existing CLI users. Too bad it never played out. https://wiki.mozilla.org/Labs/Ubiquity https://wiki.mozilla.org/Labs/Ubiquity

chocolatebunny 8y ago
That kind of stuff comes up every so often. I heard rumors in the early 2000s about Microsoft implementing a version of Office that was more commandline oriented (this was when people were getting sick of their "smart" menubar, before the ribbon interface).
- ghthor 8y ago
  My partner is a lawyer and we both agree that the rich text editors are massively killing productivity in the space, where plain text is PLENTY powerful enough. The dumb shit they deal with documents and formatting and PDF's. It's fucking dumb, plain text & markdown for life.

sxates 8y ago

Problem is it doesn't scale well for people. Imagine if everything you did in slack was via CLI - there are dozens, hundreds of commands to learn? Imagine if every app had dozens of commands you had to learn and memorize. Sure you could do it and be blazing fast, but that's a really steep learning curve a lot of users wouldn't adopt.

sjmulder 8y ago
What you need then is a compact overview of what is available, like `man intro`, and something like `apropos`.
chris_mc 8y ago
Look at the VSCODE command bar. You start to type what you want to do, and the search function is incredible, helping you find any command you want. Why couldn't something simple like that be applied to the command line interface for a shell maybe? Heck, with `zsh` I have a lot of autocomplete commands available, including several sub-commands and sub-sub commands. For example, when I type `git remote <tab>`, a listing shows all of the possible commands, such as `add` or whatever. Just make the console smarter, _with good algorithms that aren't slow_, and people would use it a lot more.
- seanmcdirmid 8y ago
  Isn’t that just apropos?
- westoncb 8y ago
  I've been wondering this for years. It seems like the most obvious way to greatly improve CLIs, yet no one seems to talk about it...
  - sorahn 8y ago
    Check out Fish Shell.
    - 8y ago

cortesoft 8y ago

In a lot of ways, chatops is even better than a CLI. It basically can turn a channel into a shared terminal, with history, search, and the ability to comment

chocolatebunny 8y ago
Reminds me of a former coworker's Emacs workflow. He organized his work in orgmode. He used emacs for email, jabber, and irc. He would copy paste new tasks between email and orgmode, and he could copy paste the code snippets he was working on to irc if he needed help.
- erikbye 8y ago
  He'd get a lot of flack unless he gisted his snippet first. But, of course, we have gist.el.
  - TeMPOraL 8y ago
    This can be, and probably is, automatically targeted by some simple pre-send hook. Basically, if you're trying to send >4 lines, automatically gist them and send URL instead.
  - theelous3 8y ago
    Shout out to termbin for being a useable and simple cli option here.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
0x445442 8y ago
And display hypermedia.

ssivark 8y ago

Most successful interactions with Siri/Alexa/Cortana/GoogleNow also fall under the same paradigm. They have some finite number of templates/recipes that they can respond to, and just enough "NLP" to attempt a fuzzy matching between what you ask for, and the triggers to the recipes. The key point is that communication is fundamentally serial, in both voice and basic text consoles, whereas GUIs allow parallel communication streams (and hence "exploration") organized spatially. I find it ironic how the same people consider GUIs a more newbie friendly interaction paradigm than the terminal/console, and then say the same for voice interfaces over GUIs.

digi_owl 8y ago
https://www.osnews.com/story/6282 https://www.osnews.com/story/6282
protomyth 8y ago
It makes on wonder if an Infocom-style VM could be adapted for CLI use. They did have a database as I recall.
sharmi 8y ago
Maybe because, the cli mode means, you need to remember the commands? In GUI mode, though inefficient, you know exactly where to access help and a few basic params (like dropdown menu on top, usually save under file, cut and copy under edit) that smoothens the learning curve. They have some solid ground from which to start exploring. Whereas under console mode, there is no unifying paradigm. So each tool has a different way of doing the same thing. There is a lot of inertia at the start. Like what command is it for help 'h' or 'h?' or 'help' or 'H' ? What command is it for quit 'q' or 'quit' or 'ctrl+d' or 'ctrl+c' or 'bye' ? For example, in gmail, I expected archive to be 'a' and delete to be 'd' or atleast "DEL". Very basic operations and basic expectations. Turns out, archive is '#' and delete is some char I can't remember now (I think '{' and '}' to indicate whether to go to the previous mail or the next mail. A 'd' to go to next mail and a 'D' to go to previous email would have been a lot more intuitive). Of course, you can customize the key bindings, but then you got to go do it across all your accounts. While people may be quite happy to be able to wield so much power within the slack environment, they are very quickly going to lose their enthusiasm with the introduction of each new console tool, unless what they have learned in the slack environment translates into easier learning curve in the next console env. Basically for users to be able to adopt the console mode, there is should be some sort of standardization.

swerveonem 8y ago

It's the rediscovery of mIRC like interaction workflows.

digi_owl 8y ago
IRC... But yes, Slack is basically IRC with a built in bouncer. And i case people wonder, a bouncer or BNC, was a personal proxy that would be running on some server somewhere, and that maintained a presence on the IRC networks for you when you logged off. And when you logged back on, you got a log of all the traffic on the relevant channels and direct messages while you were gone.
- collinmanderson 8y ago
  Yes. This is why slack has been more successful than irc.
0x445442 8y ago
Got most of my music through mIRC :p

Avshalom 8y ago

in cases like that how can you distinguish loving the cli paradigm and loving some one else doing the work for them

wruza 8y ago

You may check telegram’s games, services and other bots that allow to manage your entire world via chat (with programmatic buttons and menus to ease /cmds a little). I don’t use it much, but my coworker said that he almost lives there, visiting sites only for long, static content. From this perspective, “we” don’t “need” as the article says, since it’s already there and writing a simple bot is a no-brainer. (Downsides of proprietary protocol are obvious.)

skewart 8y ago
Genuinely curious, why don't you use it much?
- wruza 8y ago
  I’m not really into social games in my language (maybe should try english areas). Anyway, discoverability is a hard part of telegram. Like you don’t see tg-links on the internet often. For bots part I just didn’t go there yet – no particular need. I’ve written two utility bots for my company though.

0x445442 8y ago

Ding, ding, ding!!! I've been beating this drum for a few years now. The interesting thing about chat bots is the UI not natural language processing. I think people are completely overwhelmed by the massive lack of consistent UI the Web has brought us. I also think the more "apps" that could be brought into platforms like Telegram, the happier users would be. There's also evidence of this in China where 100's of millions of people use WeChat for a large percentage of their needs.

jstarfish 8y ago
Really? It seems that with the advent of Bootstrap and responsive design, website UIs are more consistent and generic than ever before. Every corporate landing page is a jumbotron/full-width image, followed by three columns of bullshit, followed by a few rows of random glyphicons and more vague nonsense to cross the minimum text SEO threshold, and a footer. The early internet was a much wilder place. Frames or no frames? Tables for layout or not? Dare we use an imagemap? Fuck it, let's do the whole thing in Flash. It was chaos. Now, one thing that has also come to pass is websites with straight up cryptic UIs. Buttons no longer have labels. We have hamburgers and hieroglyphs. I think that might be more of a driving frustration.
- 0x445442 8y ago
  I'd agree with you when you're talking about websites that are, for the most part static and just conveying information. But when you're talking about actual web applications designed to get work done I think things are wildly disjointed. If I were to show you the web apps I interact with regularly, both personally and professionally, you'd see what I'm talking about.
  - jstarfish 8y ago
    Fair enough. I had not considered apps :)
collinmanderson 8y ago
I realize it’s called “WeChat”, but isn’t it super popular because all of the mini UI-driven apps inside of it? I don’t get the impression that people really talking to bots much using that app. They’re either chatting with humans or interacting with UIs. http://a16z.com/2015/08/06/wechat-china-mobile-first/ http://a16z.com/2015/08/06/wechat-china-mobile-first/

Tagbert 8y ago

CLIs work well when the universe of commands is small or the user is very familiar with the application. Discoverability suffers, even with man pages. Where a GUI helps is for the casual user who needs help understanding the options. An interface that can allow both styles of interaction has the flexibility to give both kinds of users what they need.

Kagerjay 8y ago

Thats the same way with architectural CAD design programs like AutoCAD You can do things with the toolbars but every competent architect relies on CLI tools instead for common things like "move" , "scale", "copy", etc I've never considered slack as a CLI tool for the masses this is a great analogy. I should do more research on existing slackbots