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I'm not sure it's such a bleak world. If anything, CLIs are thriving on Macs and Linux boxes (in the cloud). Few people of my generation (70s/80s) would have e

by wenc 6y ago

I'm not sure it's such a bleak world. If anything, CLIs are thriving on Macs and Linux boxes (in the cloud). Few people of my generation (70s/80s) would have ever predicted a whole new generation of hipster programmers and web designers today who think nothing of dropping to bash and ssh'ing and running npm. Or using vim and REPLs. We thought the whole world would go full GUI by the early late 90s (and it has, yet the console has continued to dominate). Kids these days are more comfortable with the command-line than a whole generation of Windows programmers before them. As for AS/400, I can't say I've interacted with it too much apart from a few brief occasions interfacing with DB2 on AS/400 and it was less than elegant (involved lots of emulation). We had a hard time building anything on top of it. The interoperability of AS/400 with non-IBM systems didn't seem to be that great, even though the system itself was rock-solid and ran mission-critical workloads extremely reliably. I do miss the warm glow of a Turbo Vision IDE (I wrote my first real TUI application on Borland Paradox 4.0) and how quickly one could zip around and get stuff done.

artificialLimbs 6y ago
Hesaid anecdata, but our company (that I recently joined) has been using AS/400 (now named IBM i, I believe) for 20 years and has had less than 6 hours of downtime. As I understand it, one would definitely need training/study to interface with it.
- ghaff 6y ago
  These days, IBM i is specifically the operating system (so OS/400 successor), which is one of the operating systems (besides AIX and Linux) that run on IBM Power hardware.
systemvoltage 6y ago
You're right about AS/400 - it is a giant pain for developers in our company. But for the user, it is amazing. I agree with the rest of the take but you seem to be coming from a developer's standpoint and I am talking about the user side. Developers back then also had access to terminal and knew how to use it. It's just that the entire software industry has grown. When I was 10 years old, we had to write a turtle program in DOS. Tell me which 10 year olds today know CLI? They're all plastered to their iPads.
- tlarkworthy 6y ago
  Some know the /command interface to Minecraft.
  - patwolf 6y ago
    My child is in awe when he sees me use the Minecraft CLI. He was excited to start kindergarten specifically to learn to read and write enough to use the CLI. I'm hoping that will eventually be his entree into programming. It does give me some hope that future generations will still use computers and not just tablets.
    - MayeulC 6y ago
      Language is kind of the way we have serialized our thoughts for communication and storage. CLI is probably the simplest way to implement that in a computer, but you could probably go quite far by providing a TTS/STT interface to a CLI. I'm not saying that's what you should do with Minecraft, but it could be interesting to see how such an interface is usable.
    - tlarkworthy 6y ago
      Minecraft has taught our kids to write just for the search item interface. I just draw pictures with the words underneath for their favourites items and they copy them. A great carrot :)
- numlock86 6y ago
  > Tell me which 10 year olds today know CLI? They're all plastered to their iPads. Prime example of juvenoia and biased stereotypical thinking right there. "Back in my days ..." ™ I know more kids in the ages up to 13 who are interested in actually exploring and working with technical stuff (programming and electronics for example) than kids who spend their most time just "consuming" and using these things. The main reason is that these things are much more accessible these days. YMMV, depending on your social and demographic environment I guess ...
  - 6y ago
kilroy123 6y ago
Can confirm. I'm such a hipster on Mac who strongly prefers the command line. Though, to be fair, I started using a computer in the early 90s which was a DOS machine and only had the command line. So I grew up using a computer this way.
kochthesecond 6y ago
I would have to say this. CLIs are much simpler to make and much cheaper to support. Making one-off tools to automate tasks, or even building a set of internal tools for handling certain operations is much more feasible when you can churn it out in an hour and be done with it. Just today I spent an hour modifying an old cli tool to help process some customers that I could get as Csv. If I was to make a gui tool for this job, it might take a week or two and the result would be way less flexible.
eru 6y ago
Delphi was also pretty neat. (Not my favourite language, by far. But I did appreciate what it gave you. And some of my friends did amazing things with it.)

by wenc 6y ago

artificialLimbs 6y ago

Hesaid anecdata, but our company (that I recently joined) has been using AS/400 (now named IBM i, I believe) for 20 years and has had less than 6 hours of downtime. As I understand it, one would definitely need training/study to interface with it.

ghaff 6y ago
These days, IBM i is specifically the operating system (so OS/400 successor), which is one of the operating systems (besides AIX and Linux) that run on IBM Power hardware.

systemvoltage 6y ago

You're right about AS/400 - it is a giant pain for developers in our company. But for the user, it is amazing. I agree with the rest of the take but you seem to be coming from a developer's standpoint and I am talking about the user side. Developers back then also had access to terminal and knew how to use it. It's just that the entire software industry has grown. When I was 10 years old, we had to write a turtle program in DOS. Tell me which 10 year olds today know CLI? They're all plastered to their iPads.

tlarkworthy 6y ago
Some know the /command interface to Minecraft.
- patwolf 6y ago
  My child is in awe when he sees me use the Minecraft CLI. He was excited to start kindergarten specifically to learn to read and write enough to use the CLI. I'm hoping that will eventually be his entree into programming. It does give me some hope that future generations will still use computers and not just tablets.
  - MayeulC 6y ago
    Language is kind of the way we have serialized our thoughts for communication and storage. CLI is probably the simplest way to implement that in a computer, but you could probably go quite far by providing a TTS/STT interface to a CLI. I'm not saying that's what you should do with Minecraft, but it could be interesting to see how such an interface is usable.
  - tlarkworthy 6y ago
    Minecraft has taught our kids to write just for the search item interface. I just draw pictures with the words underneath for their favourites items and they copy them. A great carrot :)
numlock86 6y ago
> Tell me which 10 year olds today know CLI? They're all plastered to their iPads. Prime example of juvenoia and biased stereotypical thinking right there. "Back in my days ..." ™ I know more kids in the ages up to 13 who are interested in actually exploring and working with technical stuff (programming and electronics for example) than kids who spend their most time just "consuming" and using these things. The main reason is that these things are much more accessible these days. YMMV, depending on your social and demographic environment I guess ...
- 6y ago

kilroy123 6y ago

Can confirm. I'm such a hipster on Mac who strongly prefers the command line. Though, to be fair, I started using a computer in the early 90s which was a DOS machine and only had the command line. So I grew up using a computer this way.

kochthesecond 6y ago

I would have to say this. CLIs are much simpler to make and much cheaper to support. Making one-off tools to automate tasks, or even building a set of internal tools for handling certain operations is much more feasible when you can churn it out in an hour and be done with it. Just today I spent an hour modifying an old cli tool to help process some customers that I could get as Csv. If I was to make a gui tool for this job, it might take a week or two and the result would be way less flexible.

eru 6y ago

Delphi was also pretty neat. (Not my favourite language, by far. But I did appreciate what it gave you. And some of my friends did amazing things with it.)