10 ms·

Bruce compares using CLI tools (git rm –cached readme.txt) to camping in harsh weather and then goes on to say: > I spend a considerable portion of my income o

by dexen 15y ago

Bruce compares using CLI tools (git rm –cached readme.txt) to camping in harsh weather and then goes on to say: > I spend a considerable portion of my income on a house with a heating system and three flushing toilets, so there’s no bloody way I’m going camping. Let me kindly remind you that every comfy house is built on ground first pioneered by people enduring hardships of camping. Not because they wanted to punish themselves, but because they were working on the frontier and pushing bounds forward. It's thanks to them -- both the well known explorers and the John Does of the frontier -- that all lands, once devoid of civilization, became user-friendly. You may want to live in the suburbs of GUI, that's cool; I'd rather git-commit myself to the frontier and git-push forward, for much is still to be discovered and conquered. And there's great sense of adventure and camaraderie around there :-) -- wanders off to work on that pesky little website

rythie 15y ago
FYI, Bruce does work on cutting edge stuff like writing a book about HTML5 http://www.peachpit.com/store/product.aspx?isbn=0321687299 http://www.peachpit.com/store/product.aspx?isbn=0321687299 and giving talks in various places evangelising open standards as part of his work for Opera.
skrebbel 15y ago
> Let me kindly remind you that every comfy house is built on ground first pioneered by people enduring hardships of camping. I think Bruce is on about the people who have a comfy house, but still choose to endure the hardships of camping. That, he feels (and I couldn't agree more), is more like masochism than like pioneering. For example, I really don't see why 'git commit -a -m "turd"' is pioneering while right-click, Commit, check boxes, enter "turd", click "Ok" is not.
- Kliment 15y ago
  Honestly, the latter feels more like masochism to me. I have to move my hands off the keyboard to do it, and it takes three times as long.
  - slowpoke 15y ago
    Pretty much this. Call me an elitist or a backwards conservative[1] for this, but there is absolutely no way a GUI will ever be faster and more productive than using the CLI for pretty much all tasks I can currently think off (that don't inherently require a GUI, like Graphic Design etc). Mind you though, I'm not saying that a GUI is unproductive or bad in any way. Just that it's almost always less efficient if you know what you're doing. [1] Just for the record, I'm on GNU/Linux since about a year now. At first I was like "wtf CLI" myself. Then I slowly learned to appreciate it. So I'm not someone who's been using CLI since the dawn of Unix and is waving his cane at the kids on his lawn.
- spacemanaki 15y ago
  I'm definitely diving off into an OT area here but I'm going to bite anyway. "For example, I really don't see why 'git commit -a -m "turd"' is pioneering while right-click, Commit, check boxes, enter "turd", click "Ok" is not." I agree with you, if the GUI you're talking about is some wonderful Git GUI and you like it, awesome. I got the impression from the post that this author isn't impressed by people using Git at all: "I’m scared of Git and Subversion." I think that's what the grandparent was talking about regarding the frontiers. Git (and Hg, and Darcs, and Bazaar...) is on the frontier, and this means that it's a bit rough and ready. But a lot of people find it productive and useful and the benefits outweigh the costs of reading manpages to find argument flags. That's kind of how I feel about Git GUIs, since many of them are still rough and ready, and just aren't as powerful as the CLI (see TortoiseGit, where you cannot interact with the index, and the Eclipse plugin, which doesn't support submodules and makes some infuriating decisions about how to manage more than one Eclipse project inside a Git repo). But if you're more productive with a GUI than the Git CLI, great! I just get the feeling that the OP isn't interested in better tools for the sake of better tools, which is a bit disingenuous since Opera and the web and all the great stuff he talks about wouldn't have been possible if we were still using punch cards.
- icebraining 15y ago
  >I think Bruce is on about the people who have a comfy house, but still choose to endure the hardships of camping. I don't get that analogy. My house may be comfy, but I can't travel with it, and I'd rather have to endure such hardships than being stuck at home all year. And camping is still the cheapest (and for some, the only affordable) way to travel.
- dexen 15y ago
  Indeed, git commit is not pioneering. But git ls-tree ... | xargs git show ... | sed ... | xargs git add may be. To innovate, to push the envelope you need to put pieces together. Until somebody invents and popularizes a way to compose [1] GUI widgets as easily as CLI programs via something like a pipe operator, CLI remains the only composable toolkit. We have, as of yet, no interconnectable GUI replacement for find, grep, xargs, sed etc. Today's GUI widgets are individual nodes. Connected with sneakernet at best -- that's Copy+Paste for ya. No matter how great each node is, there is very little cooperation, little synergy effect. What we need is like the Internet -- live, vibrant network with rich interconnects, and ease to create new ones with few clicks. Only CLI is there today. Rest assured the day of GUI will come, people are working on it all the time. But we arent' there yet, at least not when it comes to pushing the envelope. ---- [1] from user's perspective, not just programmer's
  - crazygringo 15y ago
    In my ideal world, there would be a method for "exposing" command-line arguments that a window manager could use to automatically generate an initial window, preferences pane, buttons, etc. As a programmer, I'd love to simply create a nested array of options that the OS would automatically turn into a tabbed preferences panel, depending on data types and their groups. I suppose it's too much to ask for...
    - DTrejo 15y ago
      build it!
  - Confusion 15y ago
    There are plenty of programs that make 'GUI widgets' available for composition. They are all variations on the well known 'Microsoft Visio'-style interface that allows the drag'n drop creation of streams and networks of components, for various specific purposes. For instance, anyone graduating in physics doing an experiment that requires some electrical devices wired to up to each-other will be familiar with one such program (whose name escapes me at the moment). As soon as you become a power user, using the underlying language or something similar to a CLI beats using the GUI. Distinguishing 'GUI widgets' and the ways in which you can wire them together and then actually wiring them together takes more time than doing the same thing in a CLI, for experienced users. I don't see this ever being solved.
- devicenull 15y ago
  I have an alias set up for this, so all I would have to do is 'gca "hello"'. That's a lot less typing and probably quicker then right clicking and such.

by dexen 15y ago

rythie 15y ago

FYI, Bruce does work on cutting edge stuff like writing a book about HTML5 http://www.peachpit.com/store/product.aspx?isbn=0321687299 http://www.peachpit.com/store/product.aspx?isbn=0321687299 and giving talks in various places evangelising open standards as part of his work for Opera.

skrebbel 15y ago

> Let me kindly remind you that every comfy house is built on ground first pioneered by people enduring hardships of camping. I think Bruce is on about the people who have a comfy house, but still choose to endure the hardships of camping. That, he feels (and I couldn't agree more), is more like masochism than like pioneering. For example, I really don't see why 'git commit -a -m "turd"' is pioneering while right-click, Commit, check boxes, enter "turd", click "Ok" is not.

Kliment 15y ago
Honestly, the latter feels more like masochism to me. I have to move my hands off the keyboard to do it, and it takes three times as long.
- slowpoke 15y ago
  Pretty much this. Call me an elitist or a backwards conservative[1] for this, but there is absolutely no way a GUI will ever be faster and more productive than using the CLI for pretty much all tasks I can currently think off (that don't inherently require a GUI, like Graphic Design etc). Mind you though, I'm not saying that a GUI is unproductive or bad in any way. Just that it's almost always less efficient if you know what you're doing. [1] Just for the record, I'm on GNU/Linux since about a year now. At first I was like "wtf CLI" myself. Then I slowly learned to appreciate it. So I'm not someone who's been using CLI since the dawn of Unix and is waving his cane at the kids on his lawn.
spacemanaki 15y ago
I'm definitely diving off into an OT area here but I'm going to bite anyway. "For example, I really don't see why 'git commit -a -m "turd"' is pioneering while right-click, Commit, check boxes, enter "turd", click "Ok" is not." I agree with you, if the GUI you're talking about is some wonderful Git GUI and you like it, awesome. I got the impression from the post that this author isn't impressed by people using Git at all: "I’m scared of Git and Subversion." I think that's what the grandparent was talking about regarding the frontiers. Git (and Hg, and Darcs, and Bazaar...) is on the frontier, and this means that it's a bit rough and ready. But a lot of people find it productive and useful and the benefits outweigh the costs of reading manpages to find argument flags. That's kind of how I feel about Git GUIs, since many of them are still rough and ready, and just aren't as powerful as the CLI (see TortoiseGit, where you cannot interact with the index, and the Eclipse plugin, which doesn't support submodules and makes some infuriating decisions about how to manage more than one Eclipse project inside a Git repo). But if you're more productive with a GUI than the Git CLI, great! I just get the feeling that the OP isn't interested in better tools for the sake of better tools, which is a bit disingenuous since Opera and the web and all the great stuff he talks about wouldn't have been possible if we were still using punch cards.
icebraining 15y ago
>I think Bruce is on about the people who have a comfy house, but still choose to endure the hardships of camping. I don't get that analogy. My house may be comfy, but I can't travel with it, and I'd rather have to endure such hardships than being stuck at home all year. And camping is still the cheapest (and for some, the only affordable) way to travel.
dexen 15y ago
Indeed, git commit is not pioneering. But git ls-tree ... | xargs git show ... | sed ... | xargs git add may be. To innovate, to push the envelope you need to put pieces together. Until somebody invents and popularizes a way to compose [1] GUI widgets as easily as CLI programs via something like a pipe operator, CLI remains the only composable toolkit. We have, as of yet, no interconnectable GUI replacement for find, grep, xargs, sed etc. Today's GUI widgets are individual nodes. Connected with sneakernet at best -- that's Copy+Paste for ya. No matter how great each node is, there is very little cooperation, little synergy effect. What we need is like the Internet -- live, vibrant network with rich interconnects, and ease to create new ones with few clicks. Only CLI is there today. Rest assured the day of GUI will come, people are working on it all the time. But we arent' there yet, at least not when it comes to pushing the envelope. ---- [1] from user's perspective, not just programmer's
- crazygringo 15y ago
  In my ideal world, there would be a method for "exposing" command-line arguments that a window manager could use to automatically generate an initial window, preferences pane, buttons, etc. As a programmer, I'd love to simply create a nested array of options that the OS would automatically turn into a tabbed preferences panel, depending on data types and their groups. I suppose it's too much to ask for...
  - DTrejo 15y ago
    build it!
- Confusion 15y ago
  There are plenty of programs that make 'GUI widgets' available for composition. They are all variations on the well known 'Microsoft Visio'-style interface that allows the drag'n drop creation of streams and networks of components, for various specific purposes. For instance, anyone graduating in physics doing an experiment that requires some electrical devices wired to up to each-other will be familiar with one such program (whose name escapes me at the moment). As soon as you become a power user, using the underlying language or something similar to a CLI beats using the GUI. Distinguishing 'GUI widgets' and the ways in which you can wire them together and then actually wiring them together takes more time than doing the same thing in a CLI, for experienced users. I don't see this ever being solved.
devicenull 15y ago
I have an alias set up for this, so all I would have to do is 'gca "hello"'. That's a lot less typing and probably quicker then right clicking and such.