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Comment by rconti | Hacker News Reader

I'm actually shocked to see such a massive number of coders on HN (a skill that still somewhat eludes me) can't use the command line, which I consider a Step #0 type prerequisite.

It just hadn't even occurred to me that this might be a possibility. I'm not even sure how folks get started in the hobby/skill without the CLI background.

I'd be interested in hearing more about the skills progression of these folks, and how they got to the expertise they have today.

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I started programming in PHP doing web development. I started on Windows ME/XP and primarily used FTP to a free PHP host. After a while I learned to setup PHP/Apache/MySQL on my desktop and continue withing just an editor. Never once really touched the Window cmd.exe. After playing with PHP for a long time I started learning about different frameworks. The one I picked up and used the CodeIgniter. The first time I really heard about using a CLI was when I was reading about frameworks and came across Zend. It was annoying to me that I needed to use some "weird" command line to generate files. Why couldn't I just make them in my editor?

It wasn't until I installed linux that I really started to play with any CLI. I honestly don't remember what got me into linux at the moment. I do remember one of the first things I did was learn to setup the system using a tutorial on howtoforge.com. I went through those tutorial many of times setting up my computer.

I was an avid gamer at the time, so I also had my desktop setup to dual boot Windows. After a while I got tired of switching between the two so I ended up taking an old Dell Optiplex 110 installing CentOS on it and trying to get Samba to work so I could mount my web directories on my Windows machine and still edit them, while having Apache serve them.

I did that for a while, then got a job and bought hosting with shell access.

The classic Mac OS did not even have a command line interface, so people who began their programming careers in the Apple world between 1984 and 2001-2002 would only have had reason to learn how to use one out of curiosity, or if they happened to be doing cross-platform work with a Unix system. I had a wee bit of Apple II experience prior to the Macintosh, and I suppose you could call the various BBS interfaces I used a form of "command line", but for the most part I never touched a command line as we know it today until the late '90s when I started messing around with Linux and with shell accounts on the Internet.

While I've never been part of the Windows world myself, it has always seemed to me that the DOS command line plays a much smaller role there than the shell does in the Unix world. From '97 or so onward it has always been possible to buy a copy of Visual Studio and use it to build software without ever touching a command line, and I'm sure a great many people have done so.

> While I've never been part of the Windows world myself, it has always seemed to me that the DOS command line plays a much smaller role there than the shell does in the Unix world.

Indeed. It was possible to meaningfully use the command line up through, say, Windows 98 SE or so, once Windows XP hit, it became a relic, stuck in the command.com era while the actual OS kernel moved away from the DOS-hybrid of the Windows 95 era with the shift to Windows NT-derived OSes.

Power Shell (or however that's branded... CamelCase? Alloneword? Hyphenated?) promises to make the Windows command line relevant again, but I honestly don't know if you can meaningfully use a Windows system from only the command line these days. You probably can't use a desktop Windows system that way, which means the command line is still effectively frozen out from the real world.

PowerShell is a really cool, powerful tool. Though, it's really more of what you'd consider a modern REPL to be than a conventional shell. It takes an OO approach to scripting as well.

For some reason, I seems like it's a hard sell for a lot of .NET developers. A substantial number never leave Visual Studio and old habits are hard to break. I left that ecosystem many years ago, but still try to keep up with it.

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