4 ms·

That philosophical point about what it even means to "tell a computer to do things" is a good one. Sure, clicking around in a GUI is also telling the computer w

That philosophical point about what it even means to "tell a computer to do things" is a good one. Sure, clicking around in a GUI is also telling the computer what to do. But there's a huge difference between using someone else's abstraction and building your own from scratch. The article is about that second part - the ability to throw stuff together however you want. With a GUI, you're stuck with whatever the designer thought of. With a shell, you can build just about anything

kalx 13d ago
But you’re still limited by the designer of that shell? Or userspace? Or kernel? Or cpu architecture? I mean, how deep should you go before «it’s however YOU want»?
- ryuuseijin 13d ago
  There are some really powerful UIs that are extremely flexible, like spreadsheets, or ComfyUI, or certain issue trackers. On the whole however I would say they all still are mostly their own interaction silos and integrations with other programs have to be explicitly built for each app. The great thing about a shell is that you can glue together programs that don't know about each other. This is not a silver bullet, with shell programs being text oriented etc., but it does give rise to some powerful possibilities that don't really work with UIs.
- sire-vc 13d ago
  This is the exact problem with the Unix greybeards smug nature: no matter how low level you go you are always on top of some abstractions. Criticising people just because they don't use your choice of tools is just elitism and leaves a bad taste. If someone uses a GUI to accomplish their goals that should be complimented not criticised.
TheOtherHobbes 13d ago
You're limited by the time, knowledge, and complexity costs of hand-rolling and testing a solution to your problem. As soon as commands become even a little non-trivial, those costs mount up.

4 ms·

That philosophical point about what it even means to "tell a computer to do things" is a good one. Sure, clicking around in a GUI is also telling the computer w

by ZeroDayDreamer 13d ago

kalx 13d ago
But you’re still limited by the designer of that shell? Or userspace? Or kernel? Or cpu architecture? I mean, how deep should you go before «it’s however YOU want»?
- ryuuseijin 13d ago
  There are some really powerful UIs that are extremely flexible, like spreadsheets, or ComfyUI, or certain issue trackers. On the whole however I would say they all still are mostly their own interaction silos and integrations with other programs have to be explicitly built for each app. The great thing about a shell is that you can glue together programs that don't know about each other. This is not a silver bullet, with shell programs being text oriented etc., but it does give rise to some powerful possibilities that don't really work with UIs.
- sire-vc 13d ago
  This is the exact problem with the Unix greybeards smug nature: no matter how low level you go you are always on top of some abstractions. Criticising people just because they don't use your choice of tools is just elitism and leaves a bad taste. If someone uses a GUI to accomplish their goals that should be complimented not criticised.
TheOtherHobbes 13d ago
You're limited by the time, knowledge, and complexity costs of hand-rolling and testing a solution to your problem. As soon as commands become even a little non-trivial, those costs mount up.