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Comment by jakub_g | Hacker News Reader

I work for a reservation systems company (a GDS) that is used by thousands of travel agencies. Of course, since the system was created 30 years ago, you were only able to create reservation with a text-based interface at the time, with short commands, inconsistent and complex flows to do some non-trivial things etc. So it's despised by newcomers because learning curve is steep.

However, the company has been building new web-based solutions for a while, but all of them have so called "cryptic mode" where you can still directly input the commands, as it is order of magnitude faster, mandatory feature for experienced old-timer travel agents.

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"inconsistent and complex flows to do some non-trivial things"

Note that's a characteristic of bad design, not a characteristic of CLIs, where constraining the UI to GUI, will merely result in a hard to use GUI, instead of a hard to use CLI.

Note that in an email or printed page I can provide any CLI walkthru and anyone can follow with minimal training ("Which key is the any key?"), but some purely graphical GUIs are impossible to discuss verbally, especially if badly designed (see above, and realize the badly designed ones are going to need the most help).

First, click on the icon that looks like a Rhinotia hemistictus nose, except its green. No, not that, thats more of a myrtle color, you want the really bright green one. OK, now if you see a screen that looks like a Type II Seyfert galaxy then you've clicked thru too far and need to click back. Oh no, there's no left arrow icon to go back, we outsourced development to save money and in the programmer's culture a left arrow is an obscene gesture indicating you mate with your sibling, so our discount software uses a thoracic vertebrae, superior side up, for its back icon, isn't that hilarious a "back bone" to go back oh those UX guys crack me up every time. Something thats one line at a shell interface that could have been cut and pasted in, can involve an hour of talking back and forth about a bad GUI.

There's a reason most desktop support still rely on the command line in the windows start menu.

> "inconsistent and complex flows to do some non-trivial things"

> Note that's a characteristic of bad design, not a characteristic of CLIs

That's a characteristic of hundreds of developers creating features over dozens of years, and those features interacting with each other in subtle ways.

In my experience, even in small projects and codebases things get notoriously inconsistent very fast. It's a hard thing to keep, as it requires conscious effort and most developers don't care that much. And once something goes to production (or far enough in non-regression phase), it's a game over.

On top of that, AFAIU, in legacy systems, storage space was severely limited. Hence PNRs had a rigid structure that was not very extensible. That's another fact due to which implementing new features in a backward-compatible way might have been cumbersome.

Altea Amadeus.

And all the three big GDS need to be thrown into a fire. "Oh you want to add a person to the PNR? Well tough luck! Not a use case we handle!"

You should see how Sabre handles email address with it's bizarre, limited, possibly 7bit character set from 1959.

In Sabre emails can be like 70 characters long. But periods count as two characters, as do underscores, and @ counts as four. I mean given the choice between period and cross of lorraine I know which I am choosing to include.

What character encoding do they use? ASCII is 7-bit, all those characters use 1 byte in ASCII, and of course email addresses were originally (and until recently?) restricted to ASCII.

Something weird:

https://sds.sabre.com/XTRANET_Access/sabre.htm

The @ is 0x2E20 in sabre hex

Lotus 1-2-3 (the spreadsheet before Excel) used to have a text-based interface that people could rattle through.

It was so popular, you can still bring up 1-2-3 text menu equivalents in Excel by typing "/".

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