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In the Beginning Was the Command Line (1999)

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

#171

Post by xg15 »

charonn0 wrote: post #168
xg15 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know you shouldn't look too closely at analogies, but I think there is an interesting inconsistency in the "car dealerships" story: The tank people offer to send someone to look into the car (rsp. tank) but the buyer rejects them from entering their house . That's significant, because a car is much less private than a house. In the real world, if my car had an issue, it would be perfectly reasonable to give it into…

Obviously a computer is like an an RV.

It might also be a bus.

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

#172

Post by eikenberry »

GrumpyYoungMan wrote: post #75
mxwsn wrote: post #2

This essay by Neal Stephenson was first published in 1999. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Beginning..._Was_the_... The analogy of OS as cars (Windows is a station wagon, Linux is a tank) is brought up in the recent Acquired episode on Microsoft, where Vista was a Dodge Viper but Windows 7 was a Toyota Camry, which is what users actually wanted.

And Neal Stephenson acknowledged it was obsolete in 2004: " I embraced OS X as soon as it was available and have never looked back. So a lot of 'In the beginning was the command line' is now obsolete. I keep meaning to update it, but if I'm honest with myself, I have to say this is unlikely. " https://slashdot.org/story/04/10/20/1518217/neal-stephenson-... But people still dredge this quarter century old apocrypha up…

Neal gave up on Linux because he wasn't a developer. He couldn't take advantage of the freedoms it provided and it worked the same for him as any proprietary OS would. I.E. he had the excuse that programming is hard, a specialty that requires much practice. This is an ongoing issue with free software and is why it is niche... it primarily appeals to software developers as they are the only ones that can take advantage of the freedoms it provides and are the ones that truly sacrifice that freedom when they use a non-free OS.

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

#173

Post by j2kun »

rewgs wrote: post #158
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.

I will never understand the sentiment that macOS has been “dumbed down.” It’s a zsh shell with BSD utils. 99% of my shell setup/tools on Linux just work on macOS. I can easily install the gnu utils if I want 99.9% similarity. I very happily jump between macOS and Linux, and while the desktop experience is always potentially the best on Linux (IMO nothing compares to hyprland), in practice macOS feels like the most po…

I stopped using Mac because of the planned obsolescence, which is a huge problem with machines even 4 years old. Can't even update those BSD utils anymore because you can't update the OS, because you don't have the latest hardware, because you don't want to spend 2k more to get back the basics you had already paid for.

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

#174

Post by limit499karma »

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…

This seems to deny the possibility of equivalence of any sequence of actions taken in a bounded spaces of entities (named widgets thus type:id) and actions to another 'representation' (e.g. text):

   { select[i]@dropdown:states > click@button:submit }
The fact that we don't have this (yet) does not mean it is not possible. In fact, given that the current darling of tech LLMs can 'compute visually' based on tokens (text) should make it clear that any 'representation' can ultimately be encoded in text.

So a 'record' feature on GUI 'a' can create action encoding that can be emailed to your peer looking at GUI 'b' and 'pasted'.

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

#175

Post by jthoward64 »

layer8 wrote: post #142
isametry wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

> 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. This also applies to Windows, by the way (except it’s more like 20-30 years ago).

Whereas Linux never stopped coming up with new ideas, but doesn't have the manpower to implement them

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

#176

Post by wmf »

limit499karma wrote: post #174
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…

This seems to deny the possibility of equivalence of any sequence of actions taken in a bounded spaces of entities (named widgets thus type:id) and actions to another 'representation' (e.g. text): { select[i]@dropdown:states > click@button:submit } The fact that we don't have this (yet) does not mean it is not possible. In fact, given that the current darling of tech LLMs can 'compute visually' based on tokens (text)…

MacOS kind of had this with AppleScript, including recording. It's a little disappointing that it isn't widespread now but I realize that demand for GUI automation is extremely niche.

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

#177

Post by pacaro »

eikenberry wrote: post #172
GrumpyYoungMan wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And Neal Stephenson acknowledged it was obsolete in 2004: " I embraced OS X as soon as it was available and have never looked back. So a lot of 'In the beginning was the command line' is now obsolete. I keep meaning to update it, but if I'm honest with myself, I have to say this is unlikely. " https://slashdot.org/story/04/10/20/1518217/neal-stephenson-... But people still dredge this quarter century old apocrypha up…

Neal gave up on Linux because he wasn't a developer. He couldn't take advantage of the freedoms it provided and it worked the same for him as any proprietary OS would. I.E. he had the excuse that programming is hard, a specialty that requires much practice. This is an ongoing issue with free software and is why it is niche... it primarily appeals to software developers as they are the only ones that can take advantag…

Yeah, this is basically my take too. I had a hardcopy of this sometime between 99 and 02, and read it several times

At the time I was an embedded developer at Microsoft and had been a Windows programmer in the mid 90s. It was pretty clear that there was some dunning Krueger going on here. Neal knew enough about tech to be dangerous, but not really enough to be talking with authority

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

#178

Post by macleginn »

Using plain $LANGUAGE to communicate with LLMs is an interesting contender, which is even easier for end users than GUIs and even less precise and is further removed from the underlying computations. In spirit, it is definitely a step in the same general direction, which makes a lot of formulations in this article sharply prescient.

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

#179

Post by kstrauser »

j2kun wrote: post #173
rewgs wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I will never understand the sentiment that macOS has been “dumbed down.” It’s a zsh shell with BSD utils. 99% of my shell setup/tools on Linux just work on macOS. I can easily install the gnu utils if I want 99.9% similarity. I very happily jump between macOS and Linux, and while the desktop experience is always potentially the best on Linux (IMO nothing compares to hyprland), in practice macOS feels like the most po…

I stopped using Mac because of the planned obsolescence, which is a huge problem with machines even 4 years old. Can't even update those BSD utils anymore because you can't update the OS, because you don't have the latest hardware, because you don't want to spend 2k more to get back the basics you had already paid for.

MacOS Sequoia supports every computer 4 years old. Almost no apps or CLI programs will absolutely require it unless they’re specifically invented to support some brand new feature. I’m running it on my 2018 Mac Mini.

If you wish Apple supported computers longer, fine. I’d personally disagree because I’ve had wonderful luck with them supporting my old hardware until said hardware was so old that it was time to replace it anyway, but would respect your different opinion. Don’t exaggerate it to make a point though.

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

#180

Post by dang »

Related:

In the Beginning was the Command Line (1999) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37314225 - Aug 2023 (2 comments)

In the Beginning Was the Command Line - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29373944 - Nov 2021 (4 comments)

In the Beginning was the Command Line (1999) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24998305 - Nov 2020 (64 comments)

In the beginning was the command line (1999) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20684764 - Aug 2019 (50 comments)

In the Beginning Was the Command Line (1999) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16843739 - April 2018 (13 comments)

In the Beginning Was the Command Line (1999) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12469797 - Sept 2016 (54 comments)

In the beginning was the command line - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11385647 - March 2016 (1 comment)

In the Beginning was the Command Line, by Neal Stephenson - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=408226 - Dec 2008 (12 comments)

In the beginning was the command line by Neil Stephenson - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=95912 - Jan 2008 (5 comments)

In the Beginning Was the Command Line - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47566 - Aug 2007 (2 comments)

(Reposts are fine after a year or so; links to past threads are just to satisfy extra-curious readers. In the case of perennials like this one, it's good to have a new discussion every once in a while so newer user cohorts learn what the classics are.)

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