EDIT: forget the following, just read my next post
Quote:
In talking about the learning curve you make some honorable examples. The power of regular expressions, or scripting. It is true, learning them takes time but these skills can be reused widely and are very rewarding.
However, I am talking about the steep learning curve of learning how to use the features of particular tools like ls, wget, vi, etc. There, the learning curve is completely unjustifiable. Worse, if someone were to write wget2, the learning would start all over again and if I were already proficient at wget I'd most probably just never switch. Don't you have lots of examples like that from your own experience?
"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."
You've made a non-sequitor. The new features of a GUI program are always in front of your face, you don't search for them or read through help to discover them. Only clis need you to search through help files to find new features!
And regarding you claim that searching through GUI help is just as difficult as searching through a man page... ABSOLUTELY NOT. GUI help is usually much more verbose (because it wasn't designed to stupidly spew all its contents onto a single screen) so that you're more likely to find matches using particular search terms. I don't know if I've stated it well, but it makes a huge difference.
And as for links.. you can get some links, but it's just a little icing that's tacked on. Proper help files have introductory text, an outline, and a way to pull up more in-depth articles as you peruse the briefer text. Links in man pages, if they exist, amount to only the most rudimentary "command 'a' is mentioned, so we'll link to its man page to save you the bit of trouble typing 'man a'." There is very, very poor organization and a 'man' page is meant to be just one document. A windows chm file is an entire website. As a direct result, there is too much crap in a man page when you want a quick answer, far too little explanation when you need more detail.
"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."
GUIs are almost always far more powerful than CLI. They're not powerful in the sense of scripting and automation, but they're far more powerful in terms of what particular programs can do, what features they expose.
But even if we do say that clis are more powerful, that power is completely useless if its consequence is stopping change. Yet that's exactly what CLIs do: halt change because no one wants to keep going through painful learning. CLIs have kept generations of people people pinned to the dawn of computing, hardly moving a step! How funny of you to mention it.
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