MobileRead Forums - View Single Post

kovidgoyal · 06-09-2007, 03:57 AM

Oh I agree the CLI has a much steeper learning curve, just like learning a language to communicate has a much steeper learning curve as opposed to communicating by miming. To push the analogy further when you try to make miming achieve the expressivity of speech it becomes much harder, as in sign language.

I actually think the UNIX CLI has much better documentation than windows. I love the ability to be able to efficiently search through a man page using a regexp for what I need. Also man files are linked. Open them in konqueror via the man:/ ioslave for example and they are render as nice colorful hyperlinked HTML. You can also use the info command which acheives linking in a terminal, though there aren't as many info help files as man pages. I agree thought that Linux GUI tools generally have worse documentation than their windows counterparts.

I also think that it's much easier to find new features for a command. Since each command is designed to perform a small set of tasks and all those tasks are documented in a single place (the man page or via the --help switch). Whereas for a GUI you typically have to search through help (which is as hard as searching through a man page) or if the help is inadequate you have to hunt through umpteen dialog boxes and tabs which is a god almighty pain. But again it takes a larger initial investment (reading through a man page) for a larger long-term payoff.

So yeah I agree that GUIs are [i]initially[\i]easier to learn, but my point was that CLIs are more powerful, not easier. And as we gradually emerge from the dawn of computing we really should move towards the more powerful paradigm. I think this will happen automatically once voice recognition becomes usable. The mapping of voice commands -> CLI is much more natural than to the GUI.

06-09-2007, 03:57 AM	#45
kovidgoyal creator of calibre Posts: 45,444 Karma: 27757438 Join Date: Oct 2006 Location: Mumbai, India Device: Various	Oh I agree the CLI has a much steeper learning curve, just like learning a language to communicate has a much steeper learning curve as opposed to communicating by miming. To push the analogy further when you try to make miming achieve the expressivity of speech it becomes much harder, as in sign language. I actually think the UNIX CLI has much better documentation than windows. I love the ability to be able to efficiently search through a man page using a regexp for what I need. Also man files are linked. Open them in konqueror via the man:/ ioslave for example and they are render as nice colorful hyperlinked HTML. You can also use the info command which acheives linking in a terminal, though there aren't as many info help files as man pages. I agree thought that Linux GUI tools generally have worse documentation than their windows counterparts. I also think that it's much easier to find new features for a command. Since each command is designed to perform a small set of tasks and all those tasks are documented in a single place (the man page or via the --help switch). Whereas for a GUI you typically have to search through help (which is as hard as searching through a man page) or if the help is inadequate you have to hunt through umpteen dialog boxes and tabs which is a god almighty pain. But again it takes a larger initial investment (reading through a man page) for a larger long-term payoff. So yeah I agree that GUIs are [i]initially[\i]easier to learn, but my point was that CLIs are more powerful, not easier. And as we gradually emerge from the dawn of computing we really should move towards the more powerful paradigm. I think this will happen automatically once voice recognition becomes usable. The mapping of voice commands -> CLI is much more natural than to the GUI.