Hello? "the command line isn't the issue".

Sam Roberts wrote:

> Quoteing mailing-lists / zesiger.com, on Tue, Jun 15, 2004 at 08:13:35AM +0900:
> 
>>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.
> 
> 
> Its a bad example, and what does user-friendly mean, anyhow?
> 
> Its marketing speach. The real question is how fast to learn is it, and
> how effective  to use is it?
> 
> If it interests you, you should read this:
> 
>   http://www.cryptonomicon.com/beginning.html
> 
> You may not agree with him, but its a great read.
> 
> The unix command-line is optomized for **use**. That optimization might
> have made it harder to **learn**, but that's debatable, and for all the
> whining over the years, nobody has made a shell that demonstrates how
> the command line could be easier to learn if only it was only done a
> little (or lot) differently, maybe because it can't be done?
> 
> I've typed "cp" many times a day, for close to 12 years, and I'm
> perfectly happy it's 2 characters (like all the other commonly used
> commands - consistency that makes it easier to use!), and I was told
> only once that "cp" meant copy, couldn't have taken more than a few
> minutes.
> 
> Are you really prepared to argue that the unix command line would be
> measurably easier to learn how to use if you renamed mv, cp, ls, rm, and
> cd to other names?  Somebody is as likely to guess "relocate", "Copy",
> "show', "delete", and "go", and they won't even guess the last one,
> because anybody so uninformed about the shell that they are reduced to
> guessing is unlikely to even know that there is such a thing as a
> current working directory.
> 
> Anyhow, guessing the name for a command is as stupid a way to try and
> use the command line as clicking on icons is to learn how to use a GUI,
> or guessing the name of a method is to leaning how to use a ruby class.
> Before you start at the command line, you need to know how to get help
> (apropos), before you start with a GUI you need to know that hovering a
> mouse over something might get you a help message, and before you start
> learning ruby you need to know how to use an API reference.
> 
> Cheers,
> Sam
> 
> 
> 
> 
>