3 ms·

You can’t compose GUI unless you go the emacs and smalltalk route (MacOS AppleScript is a very poor example). The one thing with CLI tools is how easy to compos

You can’t compose GUI unless you go the emacs and smalltalk route (MacOS AppleScript is a very poor example). The one thing with CLI tools is how easy to compose them and have something greater. Also more versatile than a GUI app. Also they’re more stable than anything else. You can coast for decades on a script.

catapart 1y ago
Anything you can do in a terminal can be done with what I suggested because what I suggested was literally using buttons to write a terminal command.
- skydhash 1y ago
  Not really. In a terminal the whole input can be dynamic with variables, pipe and executors like find’s exec, xargs and parallels. That’s pretty much the whole point of a shell and CLI interaction.
  - catapart 1y ago
    yes, really. If you think what I'm describing cannot enter text into a cli, you are thinking about what I am describing wrong. There's nothing you can put onto a command line with a keyboard that cannot be put there by an app using string manipulation. You're welcome to try to describe something, though.
    - skydhash 1y ago
      There is nothing that you can’t. Visual programming languages do exist and the shell is an REPL. What’s important is how well you can do it. If you nail down the common use cases, you can create a nice wrapper and people have done so. But text is very versatile. Adding another layer on top is losing that versatility. And while graphics is nice, symbolic manipulation is on a whole other level. So fo a closed, and I guess small, you can have gui for intuitiveness. But if you want expressivity, you need symbols and formalism. But there’s one thing that still beat Graphic in terms of intuitiveness. Tacticality. I’d bet that it’s way faster for a person to learn a physical car dashboard than a touchscreen one.

3 ms·

You can’t compose GUI unless you go the emacs and smalltalk route (MacOS AppleScript is a very poor example). The one thing with CLI tools is how easy to compos

by skydhash 1y ago

catapart 1y ago
Anything you can do in a terminal can be done with what I suggested because what I suggested was literally using buttons to write a terminal command.
- skydhash 1y ago
  Not really. In a terminal the whole input can be dynamic with variables, pipe and executors like find’s exec, xargs and parallels. That’s pretty much the whole point of a shell and CLI interaction.
  - catapart 1y ago
    yes, really. If you think what I'm describing cannot enter text into a cli, you are thinking about what I am describing wrong. There's nothing you can put onto a command line with a keyboard that cannot be put there by an app using string manipulation. You're welcome to try to describe something, though.
    - skydhash 1y ago
      There is nothing that you can’t. Visual programming languages do exist and the shell is an REPL. What’s important is how well you can do it. If you nail down the common use cases, you can create a nice wrapper and people have done so. But text is very versatile. Adding another layer on top is losing that versatility. And while graphics is nice, symbolic manipulation is on a whole other level. So fo a closed, and I guess small, you can have gui for intuitiveness. But if you want expressivity, you need symbols and formalism. But there’s one thing that still beat Graphic in terms of intuitiveness. Tacticality. I’d bet that it’s way faster for a person to learn a physical car dashboard than a touchscreen one.