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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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the_duke ◴[27 Jul 24 12:14 UTC] No.41086069[source]▶
Can you give some examples? Which GUIs are you using?
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1. dakiol ◴[27 Jul 24 12:47 UTC] No.41086233{3}[source]▶
I have used git extensively in the terminal. But nowadays I see myself more and more relying on GUIs like the ones integrated in Intellij IDE, Source Tree, etc.

Another example could be qemu and the GUIs that we have nowadays. One final example would be simply drag and dropping files via Finder instead of using cp/mv