"False!" - Dwight Schrute >FTFA: a majority of personal computer users interacted with their machines via command-line interfaces...in which users had to type

"False!" - Dwight Schrute >FTFA: a majority of personal computer users interacted with their machines via command-line interfaces...in which users had to type arcane commands to control their computers. ARCANE!?!? you say!?!?! https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/arcane arcane: 1. Understood by only a few. the majority of personal computer users (your words, not mine) did understand them, in fact it was the defining feature of personal computer users 2. (by extension) Obscure, mysterious. 3. Requiring secret or mysterious knowledge to understand. the commands were well documented and did what the documentation said 4. Extremely old (e.g. interpretation or knowledge), and possibly irrelevant. not old, it was newly invented, current state-of-the-art, and nothing but relevant to the tasks at hand, they were the only way to accomplish the tasks at hand, and nary a byte of the command line lacked morphologic or semantic significance The serious point I'm trying to make is, young and up-and-coming programmers who are learning textual programming languages (more or less the definition of a computer programmer at present) should not be scared off from learning command lines. They're very powerful, and not that obscure or hard. Unix had/has a feature that can be confusing, which is the command line is first processed according to the rules of the shell, and then it is reprocessed according to the rules of the app you are invoking, making command lines be a subtle mix of several languages at a time (by analogy, a bit like html+javascript+css). You need to learn how this works, despite being confusing it is the innovation necessary for unlocking the power of shells.