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  • From: Steven Champeon <schampeo AT hesketh.com>
  • To: "Internetworkers: http://www.ibiblio.org/internetworkers/" <internetworkers AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [internetworkers] WalMart Sun Linux
  • Date: Wed, 7 Apr 2004 12:24:04 -0400

on Tue, Apr 06, 2004 at 08:34:00PM -0400, Ilan Volow wrote:
> I respectfully beg to differ.

The power of command lines (which are, as you correctly point out, a
mechanism to allow a series of actions to take place on input from the
user) is that they are simply more advanced when it comes to expressing
intentions in a compact way. GUIs require interactions for each action
(or pre-programmed widgets that can repeat an action or set of actions).

CLIs assume up front that whatever you're doing you could be doing as a
loop or a series of tests or whatever. When you're dealing with textual
or numeric symbols rather than images or sounds or other complex
"objects", the CLI is and will always be more efficient.

If you're not a programmer, GUIs are better and more "efficient" because
you don't "waste" a lot of time actually thinking through what you want
to have happen - you just do that thing as many times as you need to. CLIs,
on the other hand, if you're a programmer, allow you to skip the boring
monotony of doing simple things over and over and over ad nauseum and give
you the power to say "do this over and over and over" in one action.

I love GUIs. I've been using the Mac since '88, and Unix of various
kinds (SunOS, FreeBSD, Solaris, Linux, whatever DEC decides to call it
at any given moment, HP-UX, AIX) since '93. And I love my Mac OS X
powerbook because the GUI is elegant *and* I can cut to the chase with
the CLI when I need to do something that the GUI is, and always will be,
pathetic at, because GUIs do not allow you to arbitrarily compress
multiple actions down into one (without macros, scripting, or other
forms of programming).

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