On 10/9/07, David Nicol <davidnicol@gmail.com> wrote:

On 10/8/07, Monty J. Harder <mjharder@gmail.com> wrote:
Ah yes. But walking an illiterate through a GUI over the telephone is
easier than walking the same illiterate through a CLI. There were people
I remember talking with when I worked at GW2K, the letters of the alphabet
were not their friends.

So you're saying that Windows is designed for illiterates? I agree. But that's the problem with the GUI. It seduces people with the notion that clueless newbies can immediately do easy things, but it doesn't help more experienced users become masters, because true mastery inevitably requires combining things in ways the creators of the components didn't anticipate. And if neither the author of $foo nor the author of $bar knew you'd combine them this way, then there's no way they'd have built a GUI to let you do it. If you're lucky, someone else might do the job, but that only works if both pieces provide an API to facilitate it.

In the Tao of Unix, that API is the command line and the text file/stream.

Again, I'm not arguing for eliminating the GUI, simply subordinating it to the CLI. Give me the CLI and human-editable-text config and data files first, THEN build the GUI for the illiterates.