In the Beginning Was the Command Line (1999)

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.

Reductio ad absurdum: we should all just use an interactive assembler. Then you really are "in the context".

There is a level of abstraction that makes sense. What level that is is dependent on your objectives.