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In the Beginning Was the Command Line (1999)

(web.stanford.edu)
412 points conanxin | 1 comments | 27 Jul 24 06:25 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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mg ◴[27 Jul 24 07:50 UTC] No.41085093[source]▶
The command line is still king.

Whenever I see new coders struggle, it usually is because they:

    - Don't know the context of what they are executing

    - Don't know about the concept of input and output
On the command line, the context is obvious. You are in the context. The working dir, the environment, everything is the same for you as it is for the thing you execute via ./mything.py.

Input and output are also obvious. Input is what you type, output is what you see. Using pipes to redirect it comes naturally.

Not being natively connected to context, input and output is often at the core of problems I see even senior programmers struggle with.

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dakiol ◴[27 Jul 24 08:14 UTC] No.41085178[source]▶
The more experience I accumulate, the more I rely on GUIs. Explanation: when I was younger I used exclusively the CLI and underestimated GUIs. Now I tend to appreciate GUIs and use them more.
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1. devjab ◴[27 Jul 24 11:35 UTC] No.41085890[source]▶
I used to sort of like the Azure GUI (yes I’m a total psychopath), but then they changed it 9 billion times and now I just use the CLI. It’s frankly often experiences like this which drives me back to the cli. I like Gitkraken, but the it does an update and forgets my SSO or it doesn’t support a specific thing I need to do and then I’m using their console.

I’m not really religious about anything, but I often end up going back to the CLI for a lot of things because it’s just less of an annoyance.