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

61–70 of 271 posts

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

#61

Post by galangalalgol »

sandreas wrote: post #18
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.…

This. And it does not even exclude having a (T)UI. Modern terminal tools like neovim, lazygit, zellij, btop++ or yazi can do many things as window management, image previews and colors as well as having mouse support.

Are there any good tools to be able to ssh into a machine and preview images or render markdown directly in line with the cli?

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

#62

Post by bregma »

imiric wrote: post #33
hgyjnbdet wrote: post #5

Me: seems like my sort of thing. Me: navigate to linked website, see wall of text. Me: clicks reading mode Me: *193 - 245 minutes* Me: bookmark to read later; probably not

I ran it through an LLM and asked it to summarize and answer questions about it. Worked great to get the gist.

Are you purposefully being ironic?

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

#63

Post by xg15 »

bregma wrote: post #60
xg15 wrote: post #22

> Buyer: "But this dealership has mechanics on staff. If something goes wrong with my station wagon, I can take a day off work, bring it here, and pay them to work on it while I sit in the waiting room for hours, listening to elevator music." Bullhorn: "But if you accept one of our free tanks we will send volunteers to your house to fix it for free while you sleep!" Did Linux distros actually offer support at some po…

> Did Linux distros actually offer support at some point? Ever wonder how Red Hat became a billion-dollar company before it was bought by IBM, and now makes up a huge segment of IBM's revenue stream? Have you noticed SuSE is still around? Have you ever speculated on how Canonical keeps its lights on? Paid support, my naive friend. Linux support is big business and is what keeps the popular distros alive.

Good point!

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

#64

Post by heraldgeezer »

xk3 wrote: post #23
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.…

> On the command line, the context is obvious. You are in the context While I share the opinion that the command line is _the one true way_ of computing, I don't think this is really all that true. Computers are alien. GUIs are alien. CLIs are alien. Everything is learned. Everything is experience. Everything is culture. Learning, experience, and culture blind us from the experience of the novice. This is "expert bli…

>Why Western Designs Fail in Developing Countries

Why add this?

Whats the solution then?

We have already given so much in the western world.

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

#65

Post by heraldgeezer »

hiAndrewQuinn wrote: post #4
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.

Windows XP would probably be an old 1970s Volvo that is still, somehow, running in all kinds of places otherwise forgotten by the waking world.

OS/2 also! :D

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

#66

Post by heraldgeezer »

lukan wrote: post #54
xg15 wrote: post #22

> Buyer: "But this dealership has mechanics on staff. If something goes wrong with my station wagon, I can take a day off work, bring it here, and pay them to work on it while I sit in the waiting room for hours, listening to elevator music." Bullhorn: "But if you accept one of our free tanks we will send volunteers to your house to fix it for free while you sleep!" Did Linux distros actually offer support at some po…

"By what I assume would be some project contributor ssh-ing into your machine" Who would want that? "Stay away from my house, you freak!" would be the normal reaction. Unless some serious trust is developed, I would not let people into my house while I sleep. Also the actual usual reaction would have been more like: "hey it is open source, you can fix anything on your tank yourself" You need a new module to connect w…

Companies want that when prod stops.

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

#67

Post by lproven »

kkfx wrote: post #51
lproven wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Riotous applause from the cheap seats

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 Smalltalk community, and when I told them what I was looking for:

« a relatively mature, high-performance, small OS underneath, delivering some degree of portability -- something written in a type-safe, memory-managed language, with multiprocessor support and networking and so on already present, so that these things do not have to be implemented in the higher-level system. »

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

I gave them some links and people were amazed.

It seems deeply obscure in, as you say, the West.

But I have found an active community working on it and developing it. It is in Russia.

It may be that in other countries now the target of Western sanctions, we may inadvertently be fostering some very interesting tech developments...

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

#68

Post by xg15 »

lukan wrote: post #54
xg15 wrote: post #22

> Buyer: "But this dealership has mechanics on staff. If something goes wrong with my station wagon, I can take a day off work, bring it here, and pay them to work on it while I sit in the waiting room for hours, listening to elevator music." Bullhorn: "But if you accept one of our free tanks we will send volunteers to your house to fix it for free while you sleep!" Did Linux distros actually offer support at some po…

"By what I assume would be some project contributor ssh-ing into your machine" Who would want that? "Stay away from my house, you freak!" would be the normal reaction. Unless some serious trust is developed, I would not let people into my house while I sleep. Also the actual usual reaction would have been more like: "hey it is open source, you can fix anything on your tank yourself" You need a new module to connect w…

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 the hands of a mechanic, even if I don't know them personally. (And evidently the reputation of the dealership isn't the deciding factor either, otherwise all the independent repair shops wouldn't exist)

On the other hand, I'd be much more wary to let strangers into my house without supervision, because I have far more private and valuable possessions there than in my car.

So the question is whether computers are more like cars or like houses. I'd argue, they sort of blur the line and have definitely moved closer to "house" in the last decades. But it might have been different back then.

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

#69

Post by johnisgood »

dijksterhuis wrote: post #44
johnisgood wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am curious, why is this comment being down-voted? I mean, I would like to hear an opinion against it (not that I care about the points).

> Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I am just simply asking for the opinion of people who disagree with OP. I do not care about the down-vote per se, more so about the opinion of people who disagree indicated by the down-votes.

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

#70

Post by fragmede »

jasode wrote: post #32
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.…

>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.
Post reply on HN