In the Beginning Was the Command Line (1999)

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 blindness".

Why Western Designs Fail in Developing Countries https://youtu.be/CGRtyxEpoGg

https://scholarslab.lib.virginia.edu/blog/novice-struggles-a...

>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 targetlink

  - Windows :  mklink targetlink srcfile

This gap of knowledge is also why there is copy&paste cargo-culting of inscrutable ffmpeg, git, rsync, etc commands.

E.g. using ffmpeg to covert a DVD to mp4 by manually concatenating *.VOB files has very cumbersome and error-prone syntax. It's easier to use a visual GUI like Handbrake to click and choose the specific title/chapters to convert.

CLI vs GUI superiority depends on the task and the knowledge level of the user.

The more experience I accumulate, the more I rely on GUIs. Explanation: when I was younger I used exclusively the CLI and underestimated GUIs. Now I tend to appreciate GUIs and use them more.

I agree with you, but I think there's a caveat. The command line is king in Linux, BSD, MacOS, AIX, and to a lesser extent Windows. These operating systems were crafted from the bottom up with the commandline as a foundational layer. The idea of the context, of the "working directory", the "environment", were concepts that were lifted from that commandline centric world, into what we run now.

I think Windows very much wanted to be something different with COM. Instead of starting a shell in the context of the program, you'd connect some external "shell" into the very object graph if your program to inspect it. It turns out to be very difficult, and Windows has largely retreated to commandline centric architecture, but I think there was some essential attempt at foundational innovation there.

I would argue that the commandline has very much proven to be the best trade-off between being useful and being simple, but there is no saying if there exists some alternative.

Reductio ad absurdum: we should all just use an interactive assembler. Then you really are "in the context".

There is a level of abstraction that makes sense. What level that is is dependent on your objectives.

The command line is king, but sometimes the king is mad. Which is to say, it can be difficult to work with the monarchy when the syntax is shit. And there's a lot of bad syntax out there: overly cute, so terse as to be cryptographic, the straight-up baffling ...

Outside of the syntax (which seems to live forever), you have things like non-sane defaults, obscurantist man pages ... the list goes on.

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.

Oh believe me, I wish what you wrote was true, but it isn't.

I've seen people think they have a specific Python environment active just because they were in their project's directory on the command line.

I've seen people not understand that "python -m pip" is a command and even if they are in a directory which has "python" in its name, they still have to type "python" for that command.

PS: The command line might even be an emperor. And the emperor could be naked...

This is such generic advice about computing, it’s like saying:

“To make a building, you need to have a foundation, something to keep the roof up, and a way for people to move inside.”

On the command line, the context is obvious.

You sound like someone who never tried to write a cronjob script…

Input and output are also obvious. Input is what you type, output is what you see.

Input maybe, although realizing that instead of typing, you can pipe, is a major conceptual breakthrough when new users are learning to work the command line.

But output? The existence of stdout and stderr as two sources of text with no visible distinction is highly nonobvious and continues to trip me up in practical situations to this very day.

its unsung strength is in having multiple terminal windows and a browser open, and the simplicity of being able to hit up and being able to edit and then retry a failed command. I can't do that in Photoshop.

Yep, I ran a short "introduction to the command line" course for the devs in my team. Afterwards, I noticed that their usage of the vscode terminal was much higher, and folks were more comfortable exploring on their own.

Quick outline of the course, in case anyone wants a starting point:

  * Introduction
    Quick history of Unix

  * When you log in
    Difference between login and interactive shells
    System shell files vs user shell files
    .zshenv for environment variables like PATH, EDITOR, and PAGER
    .zprofile for login shells, we don't use it
    .zshrc for interactive shells
    Your login files are scripts, and can have anything in them

  * Moving Around

  ** Where am I?
    pwd = "print working directory"
    stored in variable $PWD
    Confusingly, also called current working directory, so you may see CWD or cwd mentioned

  ** What is here?
    ls
    ls -al
    ls -alt
    . prefix to filenames makes them hidden
    . is also the current directory!
    .. means the parent directory
    file tells you what something is
    cat displays a file
    code opens it in vscode

  ** Finding my way around
    cd
    cd -
    dirs | sed -e $'s/ /\\\n/g'

  ** Getting Help From The Man
    man 1 zshbuiltins
    manpage sections

  ** PATH
    echo $PATH | sed -e $'s/:/\\\n/g'
    zshenv PATH setting
    which tells you what will be run

  ** Environment Variables
    env | sort
    EDITOR variable

  ** History
    ctrl-r vs up arrow

  ** Permissions
    Making something executable

  ** Prompts
    zsh promptinit
    zsh prompt -l

  ** Pipes and Redirection
    Iterate to show how pipes work
    cat ~/.zshrc | grep PATH
    ls -al > ~/.tmp/ls-output.txt

  ** Commands

  *** BSD vs GNU commands
    BSD are supplied by Apple, and Apple often uses old versions
    GNU are installed via homebrew, and match those commands available in Linux

"Don't know about the concept of input and output"

Wow, that seems quite fundamental. Computing 101.

I'm not a "coder" and I spend "99%" of time on the command line. Because I prefer it. Ever since the 80s when I first used a VAX.

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 and use it to pat themselves on the back for being Linux users. "I use a Hole Hawg! I drive a tank! I'm not like those other fellows because I'm a real hacker!"

I didn’t know myself let alone computers but anyone know why Vista and Windows 8 got such bad reps?

recent Acquired episode on Microsoft, where Vista was a Dodge Viper but Windows 7 was a Toyota Camry, which is what users actually wanted.

I assume if anyone associated with Microsoft compared Vista to anything other than an abject failure, it's because they are - at best - broken or defective people who were involved in the creation of Vista, and therefore not objective and not to be trusted in any way.

Dodge Viper? WTF?

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.

I feel now the different way. Linux is never that much more powerful than other OS. It felt more like a tractor 10 years ago and now it is a good alternative to "Toyota Camry" with pretty good user experience.

Meanwhile Windows has become those cars with two 27" screen as dashboard, which has bad user experience and full of advertisements.

The actual comparison is that Vista was the Ford Edsel (hilarious and widely-mocked failure) but 7 was the Ford Comet (a huge hit).

It's a close analogy, because the Comet was actually the next model of Edsel. They just changed the branding. Same with Vista to 7.

The way I explained my continued loathing of Microsoft to a friend was that back in the day, it was like having two choices of car: a Ford Pinto, or a pickup truck. Not everybody needed the heavy transport capabilities of the pickup, but their only choice if they didn't want the added bulk and fuel consumption was the Pinto, which had dangerous failure modes. Later, the Pinto would be withdrawn and replaced with a Ford Taurus, a serviceable but not particularly fun or performant vehicle which worked fine usually, but was based on a transaxle design, so when it did break you had to dismantle the entire front end of the vehicle in order to repair it. And now imagine that there were roads you couldn't drive on and places you couldn't go unless you had one of these three vehicles, simply due to Ford's market pressure on infrastructure planners, not for any good reason; and besides, people mocked you for wanting something else.

I think your trailing question is a hypothetical but to answer:

Screenshots along with text, then use Microsoft Paint to mark up the screen shots. For example, circling the appropriate menu option in a thick red line. Sadly, I do not know how to graphically convey the double-click operation.

Its a time consuming and error prone process, best used if the buggy GUI application is abandonware. Otherwise, the new version will have the same bug or non-intuitive process but the GUI will be unrecognizable. Probably because some manager, somewhere, read too many HN articles and decided a user-facing refactor was the most important thing they could possibly do.

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 }

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

Agreed. Poor scripting/replay inherently limits the GUI.

That said, the best late 90s expression of the core advantage of the GUI over the TUI/CLI is that it demands less of the user:

"recognize and click" vs

"remember and type"

That seems very fundamental to me.

I have not seen as succinct expression of tradeoffs for V(oice)UI or L(LM)UIs

Or even write a script which is just those commands. Meanwhile every step a user as to do is an opportunity to cause a new and different problem.

On windows, steps recorder can be useful. https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/record-steps-to-...

"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 with your other devices, just build it yourself, no big deal!

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.

Did Linux distros actually offer support at some point? (By what I assume would be some project contributor ssh-ing into your machine)

I don't think that was the intended implication. I think the analogy is more akin to: "If send us a bug report, we'll fix it and ship a new version that you can download and use for free." In the olden days, you'd have to buy a new version of commercial software if it didn't work for your machine, complementary patches were rare.

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

It’s a short novel.

Putting it in a browser window gives it bad odds. You can also listen to it:

https://youtu.be/KpaUg6WwdzU

Begins at 01:30, 25 minutes.

It's very engaging, please try reading it.

You can skip ahead to his playful thesis > the universe emerging from the command line.

In his book The Life of the Cosmos, which everyone should read, Lee Smolin gives the best description I've ever read of how our universe emerged from an uncannily precise balancing of different fundamental constants. The mass of the proton, the strength of gravity, the range of the weak nuclear force, and a few dozen other fundamental constants completely determine what sort of universe will emerge from a Big Bang. If these values had been even slightly different, the universe would have been a vast ocean of tepid gas or a hot knot of plasma or some other basically uninteresting thing--a dud, in other words. The only way to get a universe that's not a dud--that has stars, heavy elements, planets, and life--is to get the basic numbers just right. If there were some machine, somewhere, that could spit out universes with randomly chosen values for their fundamental constants, then for every universe like ours it would produce 10^229 duds.

Though I haven't sat down and run the numbers on it, to me this seems comparable to the probability of making a Unix computer do something useful by logging into a tty and typing in command lines when you have forgotten all of the little options and keywords. Every time your right pinky slams that ENTER key, you are making another try. In some cases the operating system does nothing. In other cases it wipes out all of your files. In most cases it just gives you an error message. In other words, you get many duds. But sometimes, if you have it all just right, the computer grinds away for a while and then produces something like emacs. It actually generates complexity, which is Smolin's criterion for interestingness.

Not only that, but it's beginning to look as if, once you get below a certain size--way below the level of quarks, down into the realm of string theory--the universe can't be described very well by physics as it has been practiced since the days of Newton. If you look at a small enough scale, you see processes that look almost computational in nature.

I think that the message is very clear here: somewhere outside of and beyond our universe is an operating system, coded up over incalculable spans of time by some kind of hacker-demiurge. The cosmic operating system uses a command-line interface. It runs on something like a teletype, with lots of noise and heat; punched-out bits flutter down into its hopper like drifting stars. The demiurge sits at his teletype, pounding out one command line after another, specifying the values of fundamental constants of physics:

universe -G 6.672e-11 -e 1.602e-19 -h 6.626e-34 -protonmass 1.673e-27....

and when he's finished typing out the command line, his right pinky hesitates above the ENTER key for an aeon or two, wondering what's going to happen; then down it comes--and the WHACK you hear is another Big Bang.

In unix world, everything is a file, so you can poll the file waiting for something to happen. And there’s the whole signal thing and dbus exists.

Annoying though it may be, you can run a program in the background that can write to your open terminal.

Just in userspace you have;

   dmesg -w

   tail -f /var/log/messages

Because it gets annoying to have a process splurge notification stuff to a term you are working in, that's why you have info-bars which many terminal emulators support.

I can't even understand this. How does the CLI relate to events? Are you saying that all servers secretly have an invisible GUI and handle events there?

This just seems like an odd non sequitur.

huh? DBUS is very much a thing and has CLI-tooling?

That's the specific hole which Expect fills for scripting:

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expect>

Much of modern operating systems is events-based and relies on polling for specific actions, devices connecting / disconnecting, etc. Linux device management is based on this, for example. There are numerous scripts which fire as a service is enabled or disabled (networking "ifup" and "ifdown" scripts, for example), or services are started / stopped. Systemd extends these capabilities markedly.

And of course there's a whole slew of conditional processing, beginning with init scripts, [], test, &&, ||, and specific conditional logic within shells, scripting, and programming languages.

You mean, like entr triggering commands?

Absolutely -- yes Windows came with your PC, but you'd buy the new version as a (cheaper) upgrade if you didn't want to wait until the next PC you bought.

Today new OS versions aren't such a big deal, but when Windows 95 came out, and then XP, they were huge, with total interface redesigns.

On the other hand, I don't think people went out of their way as much to buy smaller upgrades like Windows 98.

It feels like while the marketing of launches may still be like that, it is purely to usher along adoption of the target future state which seems to be doing away with versions and having you simply locked in to forever paying an ever-increasing subscription fee to continue to use your computer in addition to data collection which can be separately monetized.

This is markedly different from how it was in the past when they needed people to get up, go to a store, and buy the disc containing the new version of the OS.

Yes - people bought it to upgrade, as the step up from dos to 3.1 to win95 was huge.

I actually bought Windows 95 shrink-wrapped in store, because I was so excited about the new UI, for my previously DOS-only 486DX. Also OS/2 a bit later.

I was a kid at the time, but did many people actually buy windows?

Definitely. A new boxed OS version would often be the only updates anyone ever applied to their system. Even if you had Internet access, dial-up speeds and limited disk space meant downloading OS updates was often impractical. Even relatively small updates took forever to download.

There was also the relative costs of a computer. A $2,000 computer in 1995 would be about $4,000 in today dollars. Buying an OS update would be a relatively inexpensive way to upgrade the capabilities of your expensive computer without completely replacing it. Going from some Windows 3.1 release to Windows 95 would have been a nice upgrade in system stability for many people. Certainly not everyone but for many.

I was a kid at the time, but did many people actually buy windows?

Yep! Windows did indeed come with machines, but the upgrades were always a big seller. I remember when Windows 3.1 hit the shelves and seemed to be everywhere. Same with Windows 95 but that one was a tougher upgrade because of the increased system requirements.

Riotous applause from the cheap seats

I teach data analytics and it’s required reading on the first week. It doesn’t soften the blow of throwing people in the CLI but provides perspective to why I am.

Yes, and the part about Reagan.

> Copy and paste them into the Jira ticket so the junior employee who makes half your salary can run them next time.

Or, more likely: so that you yourself can remember what you did the next time the problem arises. Or your colleague, who is senior, but does not know this part of the codebase or infra well. Heck, you can even write a shell script, automate things and have your productivity increased!

These things will be just as true and useful in some communist FOSS context as they are in a capitalist system.

It’s not capitalist oppression to not want to reinvent the wheel every time.

If the solution to a problem is as simple as “copy and paste this command”, I want to hand that off to a junior employee so I can go do other things that require more creativity.

Hebrew, you mean?

I love that you can do that with the text.

I'm pretty sure it's far from #1 (consider "Story of Mel", "You and Your Research", and many others), but I don't have that list or even know how to create such a list, as it's perturbed by variations in both titles and URLs.

I like the problem to the move away from IP Chains.

We should move to the Command Table.