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"Terminals, the primary platform for command-lines, are intimidating and feel like a black box to non-technical people." That's learned helplessness. My mothe
by dsr_ 6y ago
"Terminals, the primary platform for command-lines, are intimidating and feel like a black box to non-technical people."
That's learned helplessness.
My mother, who is a distinctly non-technical person, learned to use IRC when she was 60. Why? Because her friends were already using it. She wrote down a series of commands that her friends sent her in email, carried them out, and then spent years happily chatting with them.
Humans are very good at learning complex things when they see something they want at the end of it.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- zokier 6y agoTerminals specifically feel like a black boxes even to technical people. And that is even after reading things like https://www.linusakesson.net/programming/tty/ https://www.linusakesson.net/programming/tty/ Terminals are something I find lot of people take for granted, and don't really stop to think how they actually work. Very much a black box.
- slver 6y agoIRC can go a long way to modernizing the experience without changing the underlying nature of the "terminal". I mean what is a terminal. It's chat with a bot we call "the terminal". We can look at chat apps and see how we can integrate graphics and commands into the chat without it looking like obscure 80s thing.
- Y_Y 6y agoIs she friends with a crew of 90s hackers, or are there just some elderly ladies who recognise the brilliance of IRC that's missed by most modern techies?
- dsr_ 6y agoThere are in fact (or were, I haven't checked in on this in a few years) a bunch of middle-aged to elderly ladies who keep in touch via IRC.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 6y agoThere are countless stories like this and over the years I have witnessed many "non-technical" people using computers wihtout "GUIs". As in the parent comment, I observed they often jot down the commands and that's the end of it. Time at the computer used to be more limited. People take the most direct route to getting what they want done, then it's back to real life. Other than nerds, no one wants to stare at screens 24/7. Non-technical people will use whatever they are being asked to use. If the "CLI" was popular amongst software authors (as it once was in the 1980s), people would use it and get things done the same way they do with "GUIs". I saw this first hand. Computers for many folks are just a means to an end. The CLI if it were the chosen standard might make today's "tech" company strategies more difficult. How would ads be delivered. How would "dark patterns" avoid discovery. How would vendors justify "upgrades" without resource-hungry GUIs that slow down as they bloat.
- grishka 6y agoTo add to that, many non-technical people were perfectly fine using DOS when that was all they had on a computer. Yes there was a learning curve to it and people had notepads with commands written down. Yes it's fine for things to require education to be useful. No it's not fine to dumb everything down and take away the ability to look under the hood from everyone just because some subset of people isn't very amenable to education.