It's not a tautology, it's choosing how something works. Try it with other things: "Guitars shouldn't have reeds because they're not supposed to have reeds"

It's not a tautology, it's choosing how something works. Try it with other things: "Guitars shouldn't have reeds because they're not supposed to have reeds" "Cars shouldn't have pitch controls because they're not supposed to have pitch controls" > Maybe if text-based interfaces did provide good, safe discovery they wouldn’t have been beaten into a cocked hat by GUIs for 99% of users. This isn't so much CLI vs. GUI but interactive vs. non-interactive. Think CLI vs. TUI. Then (hopefully, I guess) you'll realize that it's a deliberate difference in paradigm vs. one or the other being superior. Indeed, this is the entire point of OP. Reification of the interaction means making that interaction first-class, and CLIs do this by making the interaction the invocation, which you can then manipulate. You can't (mostly, w/o some kind of session scripting tool or w/e) do that in a GUI or TUI. Kind of a lot of heated discussion about this but, it doesn't seem like it's that big a deal.