Hacker News Reader

Comment by Workaccount2 | Hacker News Reader

Its funny how back in the day there were people who were CLI elitist, and forwent using a mouse for as long as possible because "the CLI is just better at everything". People like this still exist to some extent, and man can they ever wield a keyboard, but if computer development was left to them, we would all be regular people slogging through a command line everyday to do everything.

View on HN

Gatekeeping is not always bad. Most people, including many members of this forum, have not seen their happiness and value to society increase because of ubiquitous personal computing. Perhaps the CLI interfaces should have prevailed and compute should have remained the domain of the educational, research, industrial and financial sectors.

Perhaps more people should heed the 'AI' skeptics. Just because we can do something doesn't mean we should.

It isn't even a specifically nerd thing for terminal tools to be more efficient as a whole. Pharmacies here until very recently used MS DOS based software (probably running on an emulator) to type your data, ordered drugs etc and the efficiency was much greater than your average mouse bumbler. I cringe every time I see a point of sale device with a touchscreen. Absolute abominations.

I've actually seen much more of the opposite since I got into the industry a decade ago, with some developers absolutely terrified of touching a CLI. That approach can work out fine for some roles but man I think it's unnecessarily limiting. I'm far from a CLI guru but find some basic knowledge there pretty useful from time to time. Most of the CLI experts I've personally met are experts at much newer tools as well.

The difference is that both CLIs and GUIs are deterministic.

And now kids can't use desktops because they only understand "apps", is this a win too ?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com