17 Dec
2011
17 Dec
'11
10:27 a.m.
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).
And a rite
of passage you'll experience again, and again, and
again... it's the gift that keeps on giving :). 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.
- Josh
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.
Kind regards,
Alex.