I don't want to fund a *lot* of things my federal tax funds on moral grounds, I still have to pay it.

Sorry, I don't have a lot of sympathy here. If they get to weasel out of buying contraceptives on moral grounds, then I get to decide where my income tax money is spent on moral grounds. No special privileges.

GUIs have safety features like the recycling bin (or trash for Mac users) and the Undo feature.

The saddest thing is that there's no reason CLIs couldn't have these same safety features, except that the people who develop CLIs are (generally speaking) grumpy old codgers who hate change and want computers to behave exactly the way they did in 1974.

That's why all the software was written in THINK C or THINK PASCAL. (Or CodeWarrior later on.) MPW had a relatively small marketshare.

That said, THINK C did have a CLI for C apps that required one, but that was just to be compliant with the relevant C standard-- they didn't really have a choice.

And yet everyone at some point has had to do a task like this that could have been performed much faster on the command line. The problem is that many people do not know that there is a faster way to do it. That ignorance is what the article is trying to address.

Right; but you're talking about a task that people (easily) go *years* without ever needing to do. And it takes *months* to learn the CLI. And since the CLI is so unforgiving (no recycle bin, no "undo" command, etc), learning it could easily cause you to lose your data.

Does that trade-off sound worthwhile to you?

The sad fact is that there's no reason the CLI couldn't have those safety features, other than the people who prefer (and develop) CLIs also hate change. Generally speaking.

If computer science students are unwilling to learn something, then fail them. End of story.

What if they don't have the memory for a CLI? What if they're dyslexic? What if those people love computers and want to write software?

You know the great thing about GUIs? They spend a lot of effort being accessible to everybody. They have tons of features to help those with disabilities, no matter how minor or severe. They have a handy "Undo" function so minor screwups don't become major disasters.

It's grossly unfair to fail someone because they can't easily use a particular interface, when the job can be done equally-well using another interface. If you're teaching programming, teach programming... don't fail your students because they can't use a particular UI. If the student can complete the assignment perfectly using an IDE (with its accessibility features), but can't wrap their head around the CLI-- well, what's wrong with that? They completed the assignment!

Should we refrain from teaching the multiplication table because we have calculators now to do it for us?

Yes. ...oh were you looking for a "no" there? Because the answer is obviously "yes". Sorry.

Any CS graduate who hasn't worked with the CLI during his/her studies is simply not worth hiring and indeed should not be permitted to graduate.

Discrimination is wrong. That is what you're proposing. That's really what everybody in this thread talking-up the CLI is proposing.

Fucking Minecraft is a Turing-complete GUI app. One of dozens. Did you even briefly think about that statement? It's so obviously proven wrong it boggles my mind.

The problem is that tasks that are fast on the CLI are always contrived-as-hell examples. "Rename every file with the word 'dog' in it!"

Hey here's a thought: I'll rename your files and time me. Now how about you do some non-linear editing of this video for YouTube and I time *you*. Oh... oh... you can't do that on the CLI? At all? I might be a bit slower but I can do your task and you can't do mine at all?

Expanding on your example, what was the MacOS way to set the color on 7,000 items, out of 10,000 that were in that location? Did the GUI tool that you are so certain is the "One True Way" provide an easy way to do that?

What exactly are you trying to do? Why would you ever have a resource fork like this? What a contrived example.

But hey, even with your contrived-as-hell stupid example, Apple had the answer: AppleScript. Everything was scriptable. Most apps were also recordable.

And of course, any actual system with 10,000 items would have them in this marvelous invention called a "database", and there you could edit the color with this amazing thing known as a "query". (And no, resource forks weren't intended to be used as databases.)

You have two platforms, one with 80+% marketshare and one with 10% marketshare (and I think those numbers are generous.) The one with 80+% marketshare is easy to develop with. The other is difficult.

Which do you choose?

Linux will never have more software than Windows until it's easier to develop, test, and deploy Linux applications than it is Windows applications. (Games included.) Until the incentive to develop for Linux isn't "well we want to support Linux" but is closer to, "well since porting was so easy and cheap, it's a no-brainer!"

Right now, it's nowhere even close.

Is this a problem that needs "solving"?

Gasp! A programmer with a basic working knowledge of economics and the value of time!? UNTHINKABLE.

isn't the current theme "its the economy, stupid!" ?

You mean Bill Clinton's slogan? From the 1992 campaign?

Wow I can't think of a more succinct way of saying, "I am hopelessly out-of-touch."

It's *really* hard to give a shit about this "story". Hey, special news report, you can change IE's look, whoop-de-shit!

Do you really think the engineers responsible for this project didn't fucking thing of that? And account for it? God, maybe you suck ass at your job, but try not to assume everybody else does.

And for the record, Bertha's stopped because it *can't* grind through the object. If it could, this wouldn't be in the news would it?

Are you a sociopath? WTF.

His mistake was calling in a phony bomb threat, which is a crime. Admitting to it instead of trying to weasel out of it is actually the opposite of a mistake.