That will never, EVER be true of CLIs, no matter how well designed.
Your perspective on this subject seems to be from an extremely narrow viewpoint that ignores the actual real world outside of your own use cases.
There are designers who worry about designing for toddlers, but that's a very specific niche, not at all representative of the average computer user. Hence my comment was not concerned with designing software interfaces for toddlers. Of course I wouldn't advocate using a CLI for an application meant for toddlers.
(My perspective on the subject comes from someone with a graduate degree in HCI, papers published at major ACM conferences, and who has shipped dozens of interactive software titles in the past decade (including some that have, surprisingly, been destined primarily for toddlers). I'd love to pursue a constructive conversation, but your ad hominem makes it hard.)
> A toddler also can't operate a letterpress, solder, or fly a plane. Your point?
My point is that you are focused on a very narrow set of use cases (e.g. operating a letterpress, soldering, or flying a plane). For the vast majority of computing tasks, a (possibly touch-based) GUI interface is ideal. Yes, CLIs are better for some things, but those things are a tiny minority.
> There are designers who worry about designing for toddlers, but that's a very specific niche, not at all representative of the average computer user. Hence my comment was not concerned with designing software interfaces for toddlers. Of course I wouldn't advocate using a CLI for an application meant for toddlers.
But I take it from this that you WOULD advocate using a CLI for email, social media, shopping, instant messaging, reading a magazine, designing buildings/airplanes/computers, audio recording and production, data visualization, doing your taxes, operating points of sale, etc., etc., etc.
(And now I imagine that you will try to convince me that a CLI is actually better for one or more of those things. I am unlikely to believe you.)
GUIs are better, not because they are more efficient, but because they are intuitive. People can understand them, so they can actually use them effectively. Being able to use an inefficient tool is vastly better than being unable to use an efficient one. Focusing on intuitiveness has opened up computing to the entire human race, instead of just an elite few.
I don't deny that GUIs have their uses, and that there are certain use cases where they do outperform text-based keyboard-driven interfaces. But the reality is that those use cases are nowhere near as overwhelmingly numerous as GUI proponents make it out to be, and that for the vast majority of text driven tasks (including email, instant messaging, engineering work, doing your taxes, operating points of sale, etc.) they are superior in most regards. Note that I do not advocate abandoning all graphical tools on the computer - you're naturally always going to need an image editor, a video player, something to edit 3D models, etc. The framebuffer is always valuable; GUIs, not so much.
On top of that is the consideration that a lot of our computer use these days converges in the browser, which is a very unusual beast altogether. We originally designed the browser to view documents, and it has now evolved in a weird steam machine that does pretty much anything and everything. It's problematic, because the web is notable for being "disrespectful" of concerns such as accessibility to handicapped users. (note that the best citizens when it comes to such matters, such as Hacker News, Wikipedia, Reddit, and quite a few others, aren't that far off from purely textual interfaces)
Obviously it's going to be hard for me to convince you otherwise in a HN comment. That being said, if you have a genuine interest in the topic, I recommend that you read Jef Raskin's "The Humane Interface", and Ted Nelson's series "Computer History for Cynics". They're a good introduction that allows one to think about the design of computer interfaces independently from the GUI mindset that has imposed itself on the profession over the past couple of decades. The modern GUI (which is really Xerox Parc's GUI) is really not all it's made out to be, and there are many compelling things about the alternative branches (check out for example Plan9, for something completely different).
The iOS-like GUI changed the world again in the iPhone, Android, and the iPad.
The reason they did is that they were better. Not because they were pretty. You seem to be convinced that these paradigms were not massive improvements on their predecessors. I'm not sure how you manage to maintain that view.
What makes them better is that they are visual in nature. Human beings have an immense amount of latent machinery to help us deal with visual things. Literacy, on the other hand, is an incredibly recent phenomenon. Interfaces that are based on words for communicating semantics instead of primordial visual cues like space, size, contrast, color, movement, etc., will never be able to compete on intuitiveness/ease-of-use/ease-of-learning.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's really not that hard.
The engineering world would be a much better place if more people built beautiful, easy to use command line apps
Toddlers are not part of the engineering world...
A:\> C:
C:\> win