It is strange that nobody commenting in this thread, or in any other thread of HN, will feel the way the author's students feel about the command line. I would

It is strange that nobody commenting in this thread, or in any other thread of HN, will feel the way the author's students feel about the command line. I would also expect that most people commenting on HN, whatever their degree of knowledge, find the command line and all the things it can do, all the tools they know how to use or they know they can learn, a lot interesting and valuable. These are the characteristics of people who really love computers and, by consequence, whatever that means, "computer science". The students referred by the the author are not truly interested in the computers as the HN visitors, and they should not be in an university doing "research" with the final objective of producing "publications". For such a mismatch of interests and people to happen there must be a very misleading set of incentives driving the academia today.