The CLI version of this is using two "things" at the same time, one thing in the CLI and another thing in some form of docs or tutorial or google result or whatever. Where "thing" equals window, monitor, screen/tmux, console tab, whatever. (edited to add, I've never learned a programming language any other way, in the olden days we used ink on paper books as the "other screen")
> different ways of looking for help
Windows / GUI way is one huge app that does absolutely everything and includes the entire world within it including all documentation and tutorials and its a failure to ever need anything outside that app, no matter if its a tool or a doc. This doesn't scale very well.
Unix / CLI way is many tools each perfect at one task, and the perfect tool for docs might be some tutorial on the net or perhaps a manpage, and that is philosophically the way it should be. Feature not bug. This scales pretty well.
GUI way is a swiss army knife. CLI way is a Wiha made in Germany of chromed hardened tool steel posidriv shape size #1 50mm blade length, which costs as much as a generic Chinese swiss army knife, but is a world class screwdriver.
Agreed, although the "perfect tool at one task" becomes slightly complex when we consider something like vim. Sure, I consider it to be very good at the "one task" of text editing, but that's such a broad subject, with so many sub tasks that the argument tends to break down.
Regarding help and explorability, I mean something a bit more than this. Take man pages for example; if I know what command I want to know more about, it's great. Without that knowledge, it's much harder to get information. In a weird GUI equivalent, you could click on an "administration" screen, and see the top 20 functionalities under that category (say, "you might be looking for: chmod, last, etc). Kind of a hierarchical breakdown of common functionality. Not only is this situation of zero knowledge more prevalent in today's non-expert PC user world, but it's also the way we've been "brought up" in the GUI world.
The CLI version of this is using two "things" at the same time, one thing in the CLI and another thing in some form of docs or tutorial or google result or whatever. Where "thing" equals window, monitor, screen/tmux, console tab, whatever. (edited to add, I've never learned a programming language any other way, in the olden days we used ink on paper books as the "other screen")
> different ways of looking for help
Windows / GUI way is one huge app that does absolutely everything and includes the entire world within it including all documentation and tutorials and its a failure to ever need anything outside that app, no matter if its a tool or a doc. This doesn't scale very well.
Unix / CLI way is many tools each perfect at one task, and the perfect tool for docs might be some tutorial on the net or perhaps a manpage, and that is philosophically the way it should be. Feature not bug. This scales pretty well.
GUI way is a swiss army knife. CLI way is a Wiha made in Germany of chromed hardened tool steel posidriv shape size #1 50mm blade length, which costs as much as a generic Chinese swiss army knife, but is a world class screwdriver.