On Monday 14 June 2004 16:13, Tyler Zesiger wrote:
> I don't know how much of the thread you read through, but I repeated at
> least half a dozen times that the command line isn't the issue. It's the
> general anti-userfriendliness mentality in the *nix community. I just
> started with "cp" as an example.

I have to agree with you about the user friendliness issue in *nix.  Writing 
code is easy.  Writing code that's powerful and flexible is hard.  Writing 
code that's powerful, flexible and is intuitive to learn and has a gentle 
learning curve, or a learning curve that gets you to master quickly once you 
learn the patterns of the basics, is really, really hard.  Most programmers 
never get to that level, so there are a lot of programmers out there who, 
when asked to do something they simply can't do, defend themselves by saying 
it shouldn't be easy to use/learn in the first place.

That mentality is, thankfully, going away as more and more truly brilliant 
programmers are putting some of their time into newer open source projects, 
instead of only into commercial ones.  KDE is one good example of how that 
way of thinking is fading away in the *nix community.

The command line interface, though, is a tough nut to crack because it's been 
around so long.  If it were being developed from scratch today, surely there 
are enough inexperienced computers users that you could probably design 
something that's both powerful and intuitive to use.  Unfortunately, a lot of 
it was set in stone when only the true eggheads (or the occassional neophyte 
repeating some basic commands they learned rote) were using *nix.  But you 
have to give credit for all that the command line does and say "perhaps user 
friendliness would kill a lot of its functionality."  The CLI is more than 
just a prompt and a bunch of commands.  Many commands work together, allowing 
you pipe information around from one to another, to create entire 
applications together.  The CLI is often not what people initially think it 
is; some kind of cryptic COMMAND.COM for Linux.  It's much more.

	Sean O'Dell