17 Dec
2011
17 Dec
'11
2:21 p.m.
On Sat, Dec 17, 2011 at 10:27:23AM -0800, Josh Dersch wrote:
Well, some people _are_ capably
of learning from past mistakes. Not all
people, unfortunately, but some ;-)
Again, the "real Unix gurus never make mistakes, and screw everyone
else" mentality. Gotcha.
Pure unadultered Unix is not for everybody *shrug*. So what? I'm not
aware of people being forced at gun point to use straight Unix machines.
There is plenty of choice: from putting various layers on top of it to
other operating systems. And btw: currently _every_ _day_ people buy
more than half a _million_ devices running Unix (and some abstraction
layer on top of it) and carry them around in their pockets pretty much
whereever they are - and they _like_ it. Yes, I'm speaking of Android ;-)
Of course, almost none of them interacts directly with the Unix running
at the heart of their phones, they interact with a higher level abstraction,
the Android system & user interface.
Kind regards,
Alex.
--
"Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and
looks like work." -- Thomas A. Edison
On 12/17/2011 3:43 AM, Alexander Schreiber wrote:
Gotcha. The CLI sprang forth from the mind of DMR complete and
perfect and it is the end-all, be-all of operating system
interfaces. Nothing can improve upon it (except maybe tab
completion).
That's not what I wrote. There are certainly enough other perfectly fine
ways to interact with the OS. Some ways work better for some people than
others. Some people are happy with a GUI only system and - to exaggerate -
abhor the CLI. Some are the other way around then there is plenty of middle
ground.
But if you really want to interact with a Unix system as such and not some
fancy, colorful abstraction layered ontop of it, IMHO there is nothing
better than the shell.
I'm
trying to say that I think that a command-line can be
interactive and helpful, rather than simply passive. (And I believe
it can be done in a way that makes both experts and novices happy.)
Perhaps not in the way Genera does it, but my point is -there is
room for improvement-. Today we have gazillions of cycles sitting
idle, displays with millions of pixels and our primary interface to
the CLI is not much more advanced than an ASR 33. (At least we have
lowercase characters.) The CLI itself hasn't really evolved at all
since Unix c. the 70s.
Because it simply works. Oh, there have been improvements
since the early
days, like tab-completion (which is very handy) or programmable completion
(which tries to be smart and ends up being very annoying, so I quickly
get rid of it where it is installed by default). >I've
literally had people tell me that "oh, accidentally deleting
>your files is a 'rite of passage'". I cannot express the level to
>which I disagree with this idea :).
I think there is a little truth lurking in it, though. While it
doesn't have to take the form of a bad experience with rm, I think that
learning that Unix is an extremely YAFIYGI system is very important,
even to the point where it might be fair to call it a rite of passage.
And a rite of
passage you'll experience again, and again, and
again... it's the gift that keeps on giving :).