Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

In the Beginning Was the Command Line (1999)

web.stanford.edu

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 271 posts

Re: In the Beginning Was the Command Line (1999)

#131

Post by samatman »

mg wrote: post #13

The command line is still king. Whenever I see new coders struggle, it usually is because they: - Don't know the context of what they are executing - Don't know about the concept of input and output On the command line, the context is obvious. You are in the context. The working dir, the environment, everything is the same for you as it is for the thing you execute via ./mything.py. Input and output are also obvious.…

> Input and output are also obvious. Input is what you type, output is what you see.

Input maybe, although realizing that instead of typing, you can pipe, is a major conceptual breakthrough when new users are learning to work the command line.

But output? The existence of stdout and stderr as two sources of text with no visible distinction is highly nonobvious and continues to trip me up in practical situations to this very day.

Re: In the Beginning Was the Command Line (1999)

#132

Post by isametry »

_yb2s wrote: post #129
llm_trw wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given what OS X has become it's un-obsoleted itself again. It's kind of ironic that you're using a post from 20 years ago to invalidate an essay from 25 years ago, about an OS that's been substantially dumbed down in the last 10 years. Bad corporate blood will tell.

In what way has it been “dumbed down?” I use modern MacOS as a Unix software development workstation and it works great- nothing substantial has changed in 20 years other than better package managers. I suppose they did remove X11 but it’s trivial to install yourself.

Not GP, but usually when people talk about the "dumbing down" of macOS, they refer to new apps and GUI elements adopted from iOS.

macOS as an operating system has been "completed" for about 7 years. From that point, almost all additions to it have been either focused on interoperation with the iPhone (good), or porting of entire iPhone features directly to Mac (usually very bad).

Another point of view is that macOS is great, but all ideas that make it great come from 20 years ago, and have died at the company since then. If Apple were to build a desktop OS today, there's no way they would make it the best Unix-like system of all time.

Re: In the Beginning Was the Command Line (1999)

#133

Post by lamuswawir »

lll-o-lll wrote: post #81
lamuswawir wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Newborns don't have to learn how to suckle. It's a reflex, called a suckling reflex. Lacking a suckling reflex is an indicator of disease. Basically a newborn suckles everything that goes into the mouth, nipple or not.

Are you a woman? Have you had children? Have you partnered a woman as your child and her cried through the night, both trying to make this “breastfeeding” thing work; both failing. “How can something so intrinsic to basic survival, be so hard!”. And yet it is. Talk confidently when you have experience.

Having a reflex and breastfeeding are two different things. The baby can have the reflex, but the mother has no milk or the latching technique is poor (as mentioned elsewhere in these comments). So the child not breastfeeding doesn't mean there is no reflex. And yes, the process can be painful and stressful to many mothers most especially first timers (experience also counts).

Re: In the Beginning Was the Command Line (1999)

#134

Post by ndsipa_pomu »

anthomtb wrote: post #123
ndsipa_pomu wrote: post #97

One major advantage of the CLI is that instructions/fixes etc are very concise and can be easily communicated. If someone has a Linux system that needs a known fix, then it's trivial to send someone the commands to copy/paste into a terminal. However, if there's a known fix for a graphical program, then it suddenly becomes much harder to communicate - do you go for a textual instruction (e.g. click on the hamburger m…

I think your trailing question is a hypothetical but to answer: Screenshots along with text, then use Microsoft Paint to mark up the screen shots. For example, circling the appropriate menu option in a thick red line. Sadly, I do not know how to graphically convey the double-click operation. Its a time consuming and error prone process, best used if the buggy GUI application is abandonware. Otherwise, the new version…

You raise a good point about GUIs changing over time. Obviously, CLIs can change, but that happens less often and is usually in response to a poorly thought out first attempt at providing functionality (or when additional functionality is bolted on).

Re: In the Beginning Was the Command Line (1999)

#135

Post by anthk »

fragmede wrote: post #70
jasode wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>On the command line, the context is obvious. But CLI contexts are only obvious if the computer user is already familiar with the CLI which biases the learned mind to perceive things as obvious when they really are not. A lot of CLI commands syntax are based on position instead of explicit argument names. E.g. creating file system links via CLI has opposite syntax positions in Linux vs Windows: - Linux: ln srcfile ta…

These days it’s easier to ask ChatGPT for the ffmpeg command line to do the thing you want, imo.

When some big shit hits the fan either with ChatGPT or internet connections, the only people able to fix systems without an internet connection will be us, the millenials.

The rest will be prompty fired in the spot.

Re: In the Beginning Was the Command Line (1999)

#137

Post by giantrobot »

chipotle_coyote wrote: post #127
Phiwise_ wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Obsolete" is too strong a word, I think. OSX isn't an evolution of the Macintosh's operating system; That'd be Pink, which was even mentioned, and it crashed and burned. OSX was far closer to a Linux box and a Mac box on the same desk, therefore the only change really needed is to replace mentions of Unix or specifically Linux with Linux/OSX as far as the points of the piece are concerned. If Jobs had paid Torvalds…

> OSX was far closer to a Linux box and a Mac box on the same desk Setting aside the "more BSD/Mach than Linux", OS X pressed a lot of the same buttons that BeOS did: a GUI system that let you drop to a Unix CLI (in Be's case, Posix rather than Unix, if we're going to be persnickety), but whose GUI was sufficiently complete that users rarely, if ever, had to use the CLI to get things done. Folks who love the CLI (hi,…

> Given that OS X has supported multi-button mice since 2001, I certainly believe that. :)

And since MacOS 8 before that...

Re: In the Beginning Was the Command Line (1999)

#138

Post by jart »

> It is commonly understood, even by technically unsophisticated computer users, that if you have a piece of software that works on your Macintosh, and you move it over onto a Windows machine, it will not run. That this would, in fact, be a laughable and idiotic mistake, like nailing horseshoes to the tires of a Buick.

Not anymore. https://justine.lol/ape.html

Re: In the Beginning Was the Command Line (1999)

#139

Post by igouy »

lproven wrote: post #67
kkfx wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks :-) but allow me to enlarge, in my poor English: "us" the westerns, we came from those who invented the IT, the modern industry. We are evidently in a declining phase. Evidently someone else try to emerge and actually one of the most prominent new power, China, emerge doing what we have done when we was at the top of the world in industrial, public research, education terms. Meaning such "technical model" work…

I 100% agree, and your points about Chinese tools are particularly incisive. As an aside, but I think relevant and you might find it interesting: A decade or so I discovered Oberon, the last masterwork of the great genius of programming languages Niklaus "Bucky" Wirth. A complete OS, UI and compiler, in about four and a half thousand lines of code. I have it running in various forms. I introduced it to the Squeak Sma…

> That is how I found Oberon. They told me such a thing did not and could not exist.

Long ago:

https://blackbox.oberon.org/

https://github.com/excelsior-oss/xds

Re: In the Beginning Was the Command Line (1999)

#140

Post by sshine »

boomskats wrote: post #30
sshine wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s a short novel. Putting it in a browser window gives it bad odds. You can also listen to it: https://youtu.be/KpaUg6WwdzU Begins at 01:30, 25 minutes.

> 25 minutes That link is only part 1 (of 7). It's still around 2 and a bit hours of listening in total. https://www.youtube.com/@robertreads4323/videos

Thanks for correcting me.
Post reply on HN