> Ken Yap wrote:
>
> I think predictions of CLI's imminent death are exaggerated. Most
> people will not be presented with it, but it will always be in power
> interfaces.
Perhaps. It's like assembly language vs. high level languages -> if you need
to get that far down into the guts of the system, go for it.
> The reason is not input bandwidth economy, but expressivity.
I like cut as much as the next guy (perhaps not as much as Angus or
Herbert), but it's still far from what I'd call expressive. It tells the
computer, in a way in which *it* understands (abstracted only slightly to
make it more comprehensible to the average human) to slice a string.
That's not expressive if you don't give a rats arse about how the computer
does what you want it to.
> I have yet to see a good *general purpose* GUI that allows me to specify
> things like "move all files older than X days to this directory", or
> "rename all files ending in .pas to end in .p". ("Let's see, where's my
> "move old files widget" and my "rename files suffix widget"? Hah!)
Sure. When I see that, I'll be riding to the ball in a pumpkin. But I would
never argue the use of a GUI for such a thing! My argument was placed in the
context of advanced user interfaces.
Hell, if I can tell a computer to "encode all the wave format files in my
music folder as mp3s, naming them from CDDB with an mp3 extension", or "move
all of the files i used before wednesday to the archives folder", or "send
Dad my mutt configuration"... I'll just tell it. :)
- Jeff
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