> Do you have any examples of tools where the GUI is more useful than the CLI, and could you explain why that is?
Dunno if you’re just having some Thanksgiving fun, since the question of GUI vs CLI is mostly settled and moot, and this debate is irrelevant, but I’ll take your comment literally and respond as though you are serious.
So are you taking about shells, or any programs at all? Are you talking about programmers or all software users? What makes a GUI, exactly? (Are text menus CLI or GUI? Is CLI defined by REPL? Is Logo a CLI or GUI? What about vi, nano, or ddd?)
Speaking as someone with a lot of love for the shell, and few decades of experience with it, it seems to me like your question assumes a rather extreme position that doesn’t seem to be well supported by most people’s usage, even if we’re talking only about programmers. If the CLI is strictly better then why do people tend to prefer GUIs? That question needs a serious answer, ala Chesterton’s Fence, before dismissing GUIs. Make sure to thoughtfully consider learning curve, effort, discoverability, prior knowledge requirement, overall task and workflow efficiency, etc.
Web browsing, such as visiting HN and commenting, is much much better in a GUI browser than via manually typed curl or wget commands. What if you had to send POST requests to get your comment up? What if people had to send GET requests to know your comment existed, and then another one to retrieve it? We wouldn’t even be chatting if this was a CLI, right?
More or less all artist tools are better as GUIs, from Photoshop to video editing to 3d modeling to animation. If the output is graphical, then there’s no way around a graphical interface. Using the CLI for this isn’t just tedious and expensive, it’s far less efficient and effective.
Text editors are not CLI REPLs, even vi and nano. Spreadsheets are all GUI. Desktop OSes are GUIs. Smartphones are GUIs. (Imagine making calls via CLI!) Programming GUI IDEs can be extremely effective, especially when refactoring and debugging.
There’s also a gray area of text based GUIs in the console window, like nano and GBD’s TUI mode, just for two examples. Even in CLI-land these things are easier to use and more efficient for some tasks than a pure REPL with text commands.
Could you maybe explain why you claimed a GUI has no value? Are you aware of the history of debate on this topic, and of academic research on this topic?
Dunno if you’re just having some Thanksgiving fun, since the question of GUI vs CLI is mostly settled and moot, and this debate is irrelevant, but I’ll take your comment literally and respond as though you are serious.
So are you taking about shells, or any programs at all? Are you talking about programmers or all software users? What makes a GUI, exactly? (Are text menus CLI or GUI? Is CLI defined by REPL? Is Logo a CLI or GUI? What about vi, nano, or ddd?)
Speaking as someone with a lot of love for the shell, and few decades of experience with it, it seems to me like your question assumes a rather extreme position that doesn’t seem to be well supported by most people’s usage, even if we’re talking only about programmers. If the CLI is strictly better then why do people tend to prefer GUIs? That question needs a serious answer, ala Chesterton’s Fence, before dismissing GUIs. Make sure to thoughtfully consider learning curve, effort, discoverability, prior knowledge requirement, overall task and workflow efficiency, etc.
Web browsing, such as visiting HN and commenting, is much much better in a GUI browser than via manually typed curl or wget commands. What if you had to send POST requests to get your comment up? What if people had to send GET requests to know your comment existed, and then another one to retrieve it? We wouldn’t even be chatting if this was a CLI, right?
More or less all artist tools are better as GUIs, from Photoshop to video editing to 3d modeling to animation. If the output is graphical, then there’s no way around a graphical interface. Using the CLI for this isn’t just tedious and expensive, it’s far less efficient and effective.
Text editors are not CLI REPLs, even vi and nano. Spreadsheets are all GUI. Desktop OSes are GUIs. Smartphones are GUIs. (Imagine making calls via CLI!) Programming GUI IDEs can be extremely effective, especially when refactoring and debugging.
There’s also a gray area of text based GUIs in the console window, like nano and GBD’s TUI mode, just for two examples. Even in CLI-land these things are easier to use and more efficient for some tasks than a pure REPL with text commands.
Could you maybe explain why you claimed a GUI has no value? Are you aware of the history of debate on this topic, and of academic research on this topic?