Confession: I mostly hate command lines and I think the obsession with them in the tech world is basically a cultural signifier and little else.
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Confession: I mostly hate command lines and I think the obsession with them in the tech world is basically a cultural signifier and little else. I constantly see obtuse command line interfaces that are worse in every way than simple GUI would be, but are preferred, I guess, on the grounds that that’s what the epic bigshot “coders” use.
@kevin most command lines are incredibly poorly designed and most programmers are incentivized to make them hard to use
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@kevin most command lines are incredibly poorly designed and most programmers are incentivized to make them hard to use
@kevin i have written a compiler for a command line
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Confession: I mostly hate command lines and I think the obsession with them in the tech world is basically a cultural signifier and little else. I constantly see obtuse command line interfaces that are worse in every way than simple GUI would be, but are preferred, I guess, on the grounds that that’s what the epic bigshot “coders” use.
Also: as anyone who has followed my work will know, the “simplicity” of plain text is illusory. Like I recently saw a “text editor” that explicitly had RTL text “out of scope.” That’s not a text editor, that’s an English editor. You can make anything simple by being a cultural chauvinist!
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@kevin most command lines are incredibly poorly designed and most programmers are incentivized to make them hard to use
@hipsterelectron real eye opening moment for me was realizing that some people just enjoy the obtuseness. The Unix Hater’s Handbook is as relevant as ever and I hate that that culture effectively won in computing.
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@hipsterelectron real eye opening moment for me was realizing that some people just enjoy the obtuseness. The Unix Hater’s Handbook is as relevant as ever and I hate that that culture effectively won in computing.
@kevin we can make it new
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@kevin we can make it new
@hipsterelectron working on this!
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Also: as anyone who has followed my work will know, the “simplicity” of plain text is illusory. Like I recently saw a “text editor” that explicitly had RTL text “out of scope.” That’s not a text editor, that’s an English editor. You can make anything simple by being a cultural chauvinist!
@kevin
how about an ASCII editor? -
@kevin
how about an ASCII editor?@wolf480pl fair enough, not “text” though
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@hipsterelectron working on this!
@kevin i'm very glad to hear it. i will be working on a cryptographic tool later this year which is a very fun case
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@wolf480pl fair enough, not “text” though
@kevin
not in the everyday sense of the wordthere is a specialist sense of the word in the context of IT that roughly means "any sequence of bytes that can be both unabiguously typed on most computer keyboards, and unambiguously displayed on most computer screens", though the set of computer keyboards, screens, and extra software that can be involved in it is somewhat context-dependent
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@kevin
not in the everyday sense of the wordthere is a specialist sense of the word in the context of IT that roughly means "any sequence of bytes that can be both unabiguously typed on most computer keyboards, and unambiguously displayed on most computer screens", though the set of computer keyboards, screens, and extra software that can be involved in it is somewhat context-dependent
@kevin
I think the latter meaning would benefit from a better term and a better definition, but I'm not aware of anyone who understands the usefulness of that format well enough to formalize what it is. -
Confession: I mostly hate command lines and I think the obsession with them in the tech world is basically a cultural signifier and little else. I constantly see obtuse command line interfaces that are worse in every way than simple GUI would be, but are preferred, I guess, on the grounds that that’s what the epic bigshot “coders” use.
@kevin there is a unique command line property where sending an instruction for how to do something is easy to send and receive by default. partially why they remain prevalent in developer spaces tbh because our community structures are so text-based. i've idly thought for a while on how can we bridge this for gui with this level of universality (i.e., not just hardcoded "share" paths for special cases) and have come up short
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@kevin there is a unique command line property where sending an instruction for how to do something is easy to send and receive by default. partially why they remain prevalent in developer spaces tbh because our community structures are so text-based. i've idly thought for a while on how can we bridge this for gui with this level of universality (i.e., not just hardcoded "share" paths for special cases) and have come up short
@atsuzaki this is a really important point. I do think I know of something which addresses this. You might check out the form driven interfaces of IBM OS/400. Basically, the entire UI is form/menu driven *but* forms always have an isomorphism between a CL (its shell language) and a form. So you can send someone a CL command but this is basically a sort of descriptor for a sort of GUI. I also think a lot of work here has unwittingly conflated text based and command line based UIs.
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@atsuzaki this is a really important point. I do think I know of something which addresses this. You might check out the form driven interfaces of IBM OS/400. Basically, the entire UI is form/menu driven *but* forms always have an isomorphism between a CL (its shell language) and a form. So you can send someone a CL command but this is basically a sort of descriptor for a sort of GUI. I also think a lot of work here has unwittingly conflated text based and command line based UIs.
@atsuzaki but you’re absolutely right, I think in essence that it’s really important that there always be a programmatic way to do something, not just a gestural one.
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Also: as anyone who has followed my work will know, the “simplicity” of plain text is illusory. Like I recently saw a “text editor” that explicitly had RTL text “out of scope.” That’s not a text editor, that’s an English editor. You can make anything simple by being a cultural chauvinist!
@kevin HOW DID I MISS THIS!!!
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@kevin HOW DID I MISS THIS!!!
@kevin have i shown you https://codeberg.org/cosmicexplorer/corporeal yet
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@kevin have i shown you https://codeberg.org/cosmicexplorer/corporeal yet
@kevin also you just deleted a post presumably to edit it and before i forget i wanted to let you know the term for the phenomenon you described is "concern trolling"
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Confession: I mostly hate command lines and I think the obsession with them in the tech world is basically a cultural signifier and little else. I constantly see obtuse command line interfaces that are worse in every way than simple GUI would be, but are preferred, I guess, on the grounds that that’s what the epic bigshot “coders” use.
@kevin GUIs are harder to write and that's its own problem. i was really into electron back when it was called atom-shell for this reason. we do not need to accept the externalities of electron to improve the situation
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@kevin GUIs are harder to write and that's its own problem. i was really into electron back when it was called atom-shell for this reason. we do not need to accept the externalities of electron to improve the situation
@kevin "i guess GUIs are too hard for you" can be an appropriately biting response to someone who cba and acts tuff bc they don't know how to write better user interfaces
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@kevin also you just deleted a post presumably to edit it and before i forget i wanted to let you know the term for the phenomenon you described is "concern trolling"
@hipsterelectron yeah I just deleted because I try to not be too antagonistic.
