In The Beginning Was The Command Line, Updated 416
Unqualified code-monkey Garote submits his annotated version of Neal Stephenson's In The Beginning Was The Command Line, updated to discuss UI design theory and fill in some of the gaps from the last five years. (And yes, he has been granted permission from Neal to do this.) There's plenty more to cover of course: Will the command-line last only as long as the keyboard? How will desktop search technology change our workflow? What about the 3D interface? Scroll to any random paragraph in the essay and you'll find something worth expounding on. What's ahead for the next five years?
As long as the keyboard? (Score:5, Insightful)
From the 3D Interface Article: (Score:5, Insightful)
What absolute, total, bollocks. Cost of helicopters vs cost of cars has not figured into this tit's thoughts, then?
Not NS's best work... (Score:4, Insightful)
His insistance that Windows doesn't have a command line shows a deliberate distortion of the truth to try to make his point.
Any REAL Windows Admin knows this is false and it's a prime way to identify an Anti-MS zealot.
Anyway, it hasn't stopped me being a fan of NS, but it did disappoint me in a big way.
the command line already survived the keyboard (Score:5, Insightful)
The demise of the graphical user interface... (Score:3, Insightful)
IMHO
Re:Hopeful (Score:3, Insightful)
Or try Fluxbox if you have an older comp, but it's not very similar to Windows.
Re:Not NS's best work... (Score:4, Insightful)
No completion, no reverse-search in history, no pipe filters (and no, pipe more does not count), and so on...
Sure, if you install cygwin you get a lot of the stuff you have on *nix, but this simply proves the point: to have decent commandline tools you have to install a POSIX emulation layer.
Still flawed, since there is no reference to OS/2 (Score:3, Insightful)
Desktop Search? (Score:5, Insightful)
I can understand the hype about searching for things on other folks' computers (such as on the internet) because I don't have a priori knowledge about where to find some information.
When I store things on my computer, however, I already (at some point) know where that bit of information is. I created my own "filing system" optimized for the way I think. You might say it's some sort of O(1) function to find something (now, navigating to that something might be a little more difficult). The human brain is way better about managing the location of objects than a computer (so far) in terms of retrieval.
Think about it: the word "search" connotes looking for something you either think or know exists somewhere, but you don't know where. If you know where something is, you don't search for it but just go and grab it.
Now, of course there are times when you haven't used something in so long that you might not remember where it is, and I can see how a search might come in handy for that. But if most people use computers like I use them, they use a small subset of the things on their computer very frequently, and the rest is archived away. I would have to say that less than 5% (that's a 95% confidence interval - it's probably way less than that) of my total computing experience (on my desktop) is spent on trying to find stuff.
Does anyone out there know how "desktop search" is supposed to improve the way I do work when most of the time I am either creating new data (programs, documents, etc.) for a specific purpose or playing games? Am I missing something about the power of "searching" in general?
pick anything (Score:5, Insightful)
Pick up an ubuntu cd, give it a partition, and use it more than the two minutes it takes to conclude it's not windows.
Seriously. Forget windows is even there for a week. Pretend someone stole your old computer and all they left you with is this weird piece of shit doppelganger that sorta looks like your old pc, but everything's just a little "off."
Accept the fact transitions are not always easy, and give this doppelganger a week of your computing life. Then go back to windows.
And make sure you have some clean clothes handy, because you're going to need a shower afterward.
Hardware vs software business (Score:3, Insightful)
The size of the profit (even if I believe his numbers) is irrelevant without considering both the number of units moved and the size of the profit margin. In MS' case, even if they are only making 10 bucks a copy on XP (which I highly doubt), the marginal cost to make it is like 50 cents, so they can essentially print money. However, he's right about the longterm viability of the operating system business; but if he doesn't think that Apple would switch places with MS from a pure business standpoint, he's wrong.
Re:the command line already survived the keyboard (Score:3, Insightful)
Note that Picard never specifies Milk and/or Sugar either. The computer is smart enough to know his preferences for that but not smart enough to realize he wants it hot? Pah.. 25th century programmers!!
Re:And the CLI still rules... (Score:2, Insightful)
2) One word. "alias".
3) Bash is Turing-complete, and if it's not enough, you can always extend it. I've once made a playlist by mpg123 `perl -e 'xxxxxxxx'` where xxxxxxx was around three screen lines long
On the other hand, show me an explorer.exe/KDE/whatever way to say "change all the filenames in this dir to lowercase". Or even "rename all these files from *.foo to *.bar".
The Annotation has Degraded the Original (Score:1, Insightful)
The annotation has added a lot of "Microsoft is Evil" commentary, while glossing over the past shortcomings of Apple. It detracts from the original.
Another example of entropy, I guess.
Re:From the 3D Interface Article: (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Desktop Search? (Score:1, Insightful)
What's needed is not a search engine, but a "utility" or file structure that forces the user to create a structure so that they can sort through them logically. If everything is filed correctly, then there should be no need to "search" your own files.
Re:Not NS's best work... (Score:3, Insightful)
Compare that to Linux where virtually every graphical way to accomplish something is usually a wrapper still reading and writing text files behind the scene.
Getting work done VS getting thinking done (Score:3, Insightful)
His constant comparisons to cars and drills and toasters miss the mark by a mile. Those appliances are not about extending your mind.
Computers are about amplifying your mind's ability to process information. Large numbers of people agree with each other on how they want their toast prepared, their holes drilled, and their vehicles to work and can safely leave all the decisions about how best to do those things to specialists.
Every person, however, has a different reaction to reading a great work of literature. There is enough overlap between people's experience in reading any given book that people can meaningfully discuss literature with each other, but not so much that we could expect another person to read Moby Dick for us and tell us what it means to us. The only way to know what Moby Dick would mean to you is to read it yourself.
How telling that the annotator didn't want to touch Neal's last section, the left pinky of god, where he points out that this quest for the perfect interface to 'get something done' makes no more sense than a button labeled 'life my life for me.'
You are the only one who can possibly make all the decisions that count as 'living your life.'
I think programming (in the broader sense of understanding the hardware and software's theory of operation well enough to arrange the 'pieces' to carry out an analysis or goal), will become more and more a part of the average person's use of computers, just as reading and writing and thinking in general continue to become and larger part of the average person's life.
Gross Margin (Score:2, Insightful)
Software, on the other hand, is a whole different business. It costs you millions to develop a large piece of software, and that cost is fixed. It doesn't matter if you sell one copy or a million copies of the software, you still have to pay that initial up-front cost.
However, once you have the software written, it's all gravy. You stamp out CD's for 40 cents each and send them in air-filled boxes for just a few cents more, yet consumers are often willing to pay over $100 for that box.
Not only does MS sell more units (than any given hardware company, including Apple) but they make a much larger percentage than a hardware company because they can churn out additional units for nearly nothing. This is why Microsoft makes so much damn money. They've never been foolish enough to get into the hardware business. They stick to software, because that's where the money is.
Monty Python jokes aside... (Score:5, Insightful)
The marginalia referred to in this thread don't amount to much; they lack continuity with the article, and come across as the querulous interjections of an adolescent schoolboy. The commentator has a number of valid points (which I don't dispute), but he has a long way to go before he approaches Stephenson's calibre as a writer.
Bottom line: if anybody is going to "revisit" the article, my preference would be for the original author to do so.
I want both! (Score:3, Insightful)
For instance, I have a directory, and I need to copy 10 out of a 100 files. There's no commonality between the ten nor are there any distinguishing characteristics. GUI's excel at this.
Now I want to rename a bunch of files and add a old. prefix to them. That's easy on a command line, but difficult to accomplish on the current crop of GUI's, at least that I've used.
So why slam either. Each is a tool with its own advantages and disadvantages.
Keyboard isn't going away until something more efficient comes along. Sure there will be cooler input devices and they'll have strengths, but for general input into a computer nothing beat a keyboard out side of direct neural interface. It would be nice to see more efficient keyboards become mainstream.
-- fiewl diwor dowe wutie er godist phudo
Re:Command shells could stand improvement (Score:3, Insightful)
I do not know 4NT, but from your example, I am pretty sure you do not know a lot about bash or even ksh.
All the features you cite are already present in bash, and then a lot more.
Saying shell scripting language is irrelevant today feels just plain arrogant and uneducated to me.
Did you even hear about the shell commands ? script ? shell editor mode ? screen ?
And bash is not stagnant, bash 3.0 was released some days ago for christ sake, with new features too.
Thanks to GNU, shells are not stagnant and from solutions I still provide to companies today, with shell scripts, I can assure you it is not irrelevant.
Re:Gross Margin (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah, Microsoft would never [microsoft.com] get into the hardware [microsoft.com] business [microsoft.com].
I've heard enough! (Score:2, Insightful)
The original author is unable to concede that a GUI can actually be more beneficial than a CLI in enough cases to justify its existence, and the annotator is unable to concede the converse - that the CLI is still a very powerful tool.
The problem with this article, and the computing world in general, is that it has polarized itself into two camps:
- The James Hetfield "Command-line BAD!" camp, who will only appreciate DWIM computer features.
- The super-geeks, who, with their French accents and their four-dollar lattés, sneer at the technologically challenged and take pride in using the most obscure tools to complete their tasks.
Until the most polarized people in both camps can get themselves to realize that both sides are wrong, we will never have the computing renaissance that we all dream of.I don't reccommend you RTFA... (Score:2, Insightful)
Apps != CLI (Score:2, Insightful)
It's true that the Unix CLI is more powerful but the Windows CLI with DOSKEY is quite reasonable.
Besides, something as complicated as this command line is typically *much* better done as a simple script, IMO -- which is then invoked from the command line, of course.
I'd let him comment on my writing, too. (Score:3, Insightful)
His writing is so abysmal that it just makes Stephenson look even smarter by comparison. I stopped after he turned the car dealer metaphor into a monkey metaphor.
Monkeys? Chauffering me around? Dude, I'm freaking out. Car dealers I get. Linux, OS X, BeOS and Microsoft, I get.
Chauffer monkeys? I don't get. Never had one, never want to have one. I don't even want to think about little blue-suit monkey-men driving me around. What kind of world do you live in??
I'm stuck now, because I want to go back and re-read the original, but I can't take more of the monkeys. Google gave me this link: perhaps you all will appreciate it as well. Original Command Line essay without the monkeys [artlung.com].
Re:As long as the keyboard? (Score:4, Insightful)
Can you speak continuously for an hour? Four hours?
Re:Monty Python jokes aside... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Monty Python jokes aside... (Score:2, Insightful)
Neither Neal's essay (well written) nor OSX (a very well done Unix) deserve that.
Re:Monty Python jokes aside... (Score:1, Insightful)
It takes a lot of knowledge to develop a good metaphor, one that doesn't obscure, and this little guy's interjections just destroyed an entertaining and quite informative read. The only thing that should be added, perhaps at the top to stop people like this, is
" This is a metaphor, and not a history text. If taken literally it may cause mac users to being speaking in tounges. "
- ac