CLI renaissance, or new dark age? The advent of the Web as the modern application platform of choice destroyed the advancement of graphical user interfaces. We

CLI renaissance, or new dark age? The advent of the Web as the modern application platform of choice destroyed the advancement of graphical user interfaces. We now live in a bizarre world of CLIs when we should be using GUIs. Before the Web, and during its rise, there was a vast array of productivity tools designed to allow users to do more work, faster, and better, through graphical interfaces. It would have been ridiculous to release a program to users with only a command line interface. We left the dark ages of terminals behind, and pushed into new territory, advancing what users could do with computers. But once the Web began to develop the capabilities of browsers further, Web programming began to teach young programmers that the web was the only place that needed a graphical interface, because the web was a "universal" graphical application interface (lol, if you don't count the browser wars) This delighted programmers, as they never really liked making graphical interfaces. Logic and functions were more fun to write than user interfaces (which only made the users - not developers - happier). This was then hammered home when Markdown was widely adopted for its simplicity, inspiring a sort of text-based Stockholm-syndrome. People started to claim bizarre things, like that the command line and Markdown were preferable (or even superior) to GUIs and WYSIWYGs in almost all cases. More languages were adopted that had no inherent graphics capabilities, and the devs moved ever further towards text. So the web has unintentionally set back computer science and user productivity by decades. Until browsers lose the spotlight, this will probably continue, and non-web GUIs will continue to be that ugly thing you only write if you have to. Users will continue to languish in these half baked solutions, slaves to the solutions that are presented to them. And devs will continue to create text interfaces that only they enjoy. Rather than rethinking old ideas and creating new ones, we are simply doubling down on the past.