> People really just don't learn it because it looks scary and isn't full of colorful pictures.
This is so obliviously insulting to non-experts. The truth is that we geeks will waste hours of our time learning an obtuse interface because we LIKE doing that, but most people don't have time for that kind of thing. It's not that they are scared of apps that don't have "colorful pictures." It's that they have GOOD TASTE and aren't willing to waste their time learning a non-intuitive interface. They'll take their business to someone who has more respect for their time.
> This is so obliviously insulting to non-experts.
No, it really isn't. My point is that the command line isn't actually all that difficult. It takes a little more memorization up front, though that hardly makes it only for "experts" (but that seems to be how it mostly settles out in the real world).
I think many people consider the standard GUI to be self explanatory, but, having had to teach some older people how to use a Mac or and iPad, I've found it really isn't. It's only intuitive if you already know how GUIs should work—coming from nothing it's just as impenetrable as a command line prompt.
> No, it really isn't. My point is that the command line isn't actually all that difficult.
For you.
> It takes a little more memorization up front, though that hardly makes it only for "experts" (but that seems to be how it mostly settles out in the real world).
Hmmm, that pesky "real world."
> It's only intuitive if you already know how GUIs should work—coming from nothing it's just as impenetrable as a command line prompt.
Seriously? This is significantly overstating the case. Yes, you still need to learn some things to use an iPad. But the learning curve is orders of magnitude less steep than that of the Unix command line. The empirical evidence is against you here.
Try teaching those same "older people" how to read and respond to their email on the command line and see how far you get in the same amount of time.
> Try teaching those same "older people" how to read and respond to their email on the command line and see how far you get in the same amount of time.
Again, you are overestimating the difficulty involved here. You type "mail" to enter the mail program. Then you hit the return key to read your next mail message. You can type "r" to reply, or "d" to delete it. Type "q" to quit.
This is true in the context of 2014, yes, but it's not necessarily historically true. My mom was basically computer-phobic before I got her an iPad in 2010, but in the '70s and early '80s, she was flat-out amazing on an electric typewriter and word processor. The word processor (a designated terminal, not a software package), was basically a really terrible command line with awful CP/M style menus and lots of complex key bindings. That, my mom could do. Windows 95-XP? Scared her shitless.
Another example. My mother-in-law worked at AT&T and then Bell South after the breakup for over 20 years. In the late '70s - late '80s, everything she did was on UNIX boxes. My husband literally spent parts of his childhood in data centers late at night while his mom did systems work.
My mother-in-law is very smart, but I still have to walk her through some stuff on a Mac or iPad. (And the Mac was a huge step for her, apparently she really struggled with Windows), yet at 74, this woman can still do UNIX commands and work in a shell in her sleep.
My late-Aunt was an engineer at CSX for 33 years. During the Year 2000 crisis, she was one of their senior COBOL leads (she got her CS degree in '74) and did a lot of the infrastructure work to fix those mainframes. But I remember her struggling with certain more "basic" computer skills, at least in the context of a Windows GUI.
It's about what you learn on. When I was in high school and college, I worked as a tech at a big box retailer, I would often have elderly people come in upgrading old machines, frustrated that they couldn't get the version if WordPerfect of Eudora or whatever to run on XP or whatever. Most of the time, those old programs were I intuitive by any standard, but it's what they knew.
If you grow up on a command line and continue to evolve what you use and try new apps, platforms and paradigms as they crop-up (which is the case for most if us here), you may not recognize the importance a first-system plays in future skills and usage, but it does. And that's why it's important to consider that the people growing up today won't enter a world where they type commands and wait for an output as SOP. Sure, some will learn those methods out of interest or for the efficiency that can provide, but people born today stwrt interfacing with systems very differently than we did generations ago, and that's why being aware of those paradigms is so key.
That doesn't mean you can't make something accessible that is CLI based - you can - but kids will enter pre-school knowing how to use an iPad -- and advanced usage too. It's the same way I was able to learn to program them VCR at 4 before I could read more than Dr. Seuss.
Our software needs to be accessible for them to use, because we're past the era of GUI being too expensice to program for or requiring too many resources.
I could load the disk drive, type in my username and run commands on the command line to run the pac-man game.
You're (a) underestimating toddlers, (b) overestimating how difficult the command line is.
People really just don't learn it because it looks scary and isn't full of colorful pictures.