The entire conversation here is missing the distinction between "environment" and "program." The real advantage of the command-line environment is that it adop

The entire conversation here is missing the distinction between "environment" and "program." The real advantage of the command-line environment is that it adopts a tool-centric, rather than application-centric approach. Instead of opening Word to read a document, you navigate to the document and run any of a variety of orthogonal programs on it. And instead of individual command-line apps having to spend time adding scriptability the way GUI apps do, this is simply provided by the environment and the expectation that the user uses tools in the environment rather than opening one monolithic application. There have been a number of attempts to port the tool-centric vision to graphical interfaces. Consider researching Jef Raskin [1] or Apple's work on OpenDoc [2]. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jef_Raskin#Career_at_Apple http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jef_Raskin#Career_at_Apple [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDoc http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDoc