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> Most people today don’t know what the command line is, much less why they would want to bother with it. This is true today, and it was true as well "in the 1

> Most people today don’t know what the command line is, much less why they would want to bother with it. This is true today, and it was true as well "in the 1980s", to use the same time frame as TFA. The difference is that today there are more people than ever who know what the command line is, and who can use it. At least an order of magnitude more people; maybe two. We can certainly say that we live in the CLI golden age!

smohare 3y ago
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nerdponx 3y ago
Was that true as a % of computer users in the 80s?
- enriquto 3y ago
  I guess not, but why does it matter? Let people enjoy other things.
atoav 3y ago
Absolute vs relative numbers. If you want to judge the shift in quality in a thing that grew in quantity, then you should look at percentages — otherwise you end up creating statements that are true, but don't say anything meaningful. E.g. there are probably more absolute listeners of Jazz music today than back at the height of the cultural bloom of the genre. But that isn't because Jazz is more popular today than it once was, but because there are more absolute listeners of any kind of music. Would you say that Jazz in the US is now more important, influential etc. than it was at its peak?
- hiAndrewQuinn 3y ago
  No, but there's so much great jazz these days that wouldn't have existed without those absolute numbers. Quantity (aggregate supply) is a quality (increases specialization of labor) all its own!
  - atoav 3y ago
    Yeah, sure. But I hope you are aware your argument is dishonest? If you want to compare two times, looking at absolute numbers isn't useful unless those numbers contributed to the rise or fall of the phenomenon we are observing. Whether from that quantity new qualities emerged is a different question. E.g. the new quantity of diverse jazz listeners probably has lead to an explosion of new sub-genres, that might have never emerged otherwise. Still, just because there is more different Jazz now does not mean Jazz has become more relevant overall. This was the factor we discussed btw.
hinkley 3y ago
I’ve been writing command lines for parts of our app to help split up the monolith. Global state and dependencies thwart reasoning and thus debugging and performance optimization. Splitting out 500, 1000, 5,000, 10,000 or sometimes 50k lines of code to work separately can clarify a lot of things. If done right it can also encourage Functional Core, Imperative Shell, because a sensible Unix-philosophy command line needs lots of actions without side effects and a few with. You can write a little command that generates and dumps out the system state just before a (bad) decision is made, and do so against production systems with virtual impunity. And that means you can hand these tools to someone who you need to become part of a bus number, even if they are otherwise hesitant to do so.
mvdtnz 3y ago
If you substitute "people" with "computer users" (which is obviously implied, despite your pedantry) then the author's jist is correct. What a villager in a remote undiscovered Amazonian civilisation thinks of the terminal is not relevant.

smohare 3y ago

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nerdponx 3y ago

Was that true as a % of computer users in the 80s?

enriquto 3y ago
I guess not, but why does it matter? Let people enjoy other things.

atoav 3y ago

Absolute vs relative numbers. If you want to judge the shift in quality in a thing that grew in quantity, then you should look at percentages — otherwise you end up creating statements that are true, but don't say anything meaningful. E.g. there are probably more absolute listeners of Jazz music today than back at the height of the cultural bloom of the genre. But that isn't because Jazz is more popular today than it once was, but because there are more absolute listeners of any kind of music. Would you say that Jazz in the US is now more important, influential etc. than it was at its peak?

hiAndrewQuinn 3y ago
No, but there's so much great jazz these days that wouldn't have existed without those absolute numbers. Quantity (aggregate supply) is a quality (increases specialization of labor) all its own!
- atoav 3y ago
  Yeah, sure. But I hope you are aware your argument is dishonest? If you want to compare two times, looking at absolute numbers isn't useful unless those numbers contributed to the rise or fall of the phenomenon we are observing. Whether from that quantity new qualities emerged is a different question. E.g. the new quantity of diverse jazz listeners probably has lead to an explosion of new sub-genres, that might have never emerged otherwise. Still, just because there is more different Jazz now does not mean Jazz has become more relevant overall. This was the factor we discussed btw.

hinkley 3y ago

I’ve been writing command lines for parts of our app to help split up the monolith. Global state and dependencies thwart reasoning and thus debugging and performance optimization. Splitting out 500, 1000, 5,000, 10,000 or sometimes 50k lines of code to work separately can clarify a lot of things. If done right it can also encourage Functional Core, Imperative Shell, because a sensible Unix-philosophy command line needs lots of actions without side effects and a few with. You can write a little command that generates and dumps out the system state just before a (bad) decision is made, and do so against production systems with virtual impunity. And that means you can hand these tools to someone who you need to become part of a bus number, even if they are otherwise hesitant to do so.

mvdtnz 3y ago

If you substitute "people" with "computer users" (which is obviously implied, despite your pedantry) then the author's jist is correct. What a villager in a remote undiscovered Amazonian civilisation thinks of the terminal is not relevant.