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In the Beginning Was the Command Line (1999)

(web.stanford.edu)
412 points conanxin | 2 comments | 27 Jul 24 06:25 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | 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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at_a_remove ◴[27 Jul 24 10:26 UTC] No.41085614[source]▶
The command line is king, but sometimes the king is mad. Which is to say, it can be difficult to work with the monarchy when the syntax is shit. And there's a lot of bad syntax out there: overly cute, so terse as to be cryptographic, the straight-up baffling ...

Outside of the syntax (which seems to live forever), you have things like non-sane defaults, obscurantist man pages ... the list goes on.

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1. fragmede ◴[27 Jul 24 11:49 UTC] No.41085950[source]▶
the ability to hit up and edit and retry is such a redeeming feature. repeating the same actions in a GUI with no keyboard shortcuts is an exercise in frustration.
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2. jodrellblank ◴[27 Jul 24 14:28 UTC] No.41086829[source]▶
GUIs can have keyboard shortcuts. Have you honestly never pressed Alt+F, x to exit a GUI program or Ctrl+S to save a document in a GUI editor, or Ctrl+Tab to switch tabs in a GUI browser or Tab to move focus between fields, or the context-menu button next to Alt Gr and then a keyboard accelerator key for the menu, or Ctrl+C then Ctrl-P or anything?

Repeating the same actions in a CLI with no readline is an exercise in frustration, but ... that's not what happens most of the time.