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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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1. whartung ◴[29 Jul 24 01:04 UTC] No.41097209[source]▶

  On the command line, the context is obvious
Hardly.

If you’re lucky, you might know what your current directory is.

More often than not, at any particular point, your command line is paused in the middle of some likely ad hoc multi-step process. A process with a bunch of state stored as opaque blobs of data scattered across the file system. More so exacerbated in my case as those files are likely cleverly named x, x1, x2.

Modern systems benefit from things like command history, scroll back buffers, and similar constructs that can be leveraged to help you, as the user, restore the current context. But for a very long time, many simply returned to a $ and a soulless, cold, blinking cursor callously expecting that you recall you know where you are and what you’re doing.

The tools are there to help you dig and perhaps restore the current context (current directory, latest files, etc.) but that’s a far cry from “obvious”. Lots of folks return, blow their internal call stack, and just start over when they come back from lunch (if practical).