Context: I'm starting a new thread here to sum up (and continue) discussing what started as an innocent introductory thread, and ended up in an intense philosophical debate about computer interfaces, as in defined standards VS. obsolescence of these standards.

At the very beginning, computers where huge, slow and had scarce resources. The geniuses at that time came up with what's currently considered the base of computing: the Unix operating system.
This system used plain text as its unique input/output system, taking input from a keyboard, and printing output on paper sheets, one line at a time.

A lot of water flowed under the bridge since then, and even if peripherals greatly improved, this textual interface is still at the core of most the derivatives of Unix.

There are now two main ideas:

One is that this proves the good design of Unix, as its interface went through the years efficiently without needing any change:

(29-11-2018, 12:13 PM)z3bra Wrote: Text is still a good human-to-machine interface (IMO, better than sound for example, or pictograms), and POSIX defines its standards around this interface.

(29-11-2018, 04:34 PM)z3bra Wrote: I guess the CLI is better at letting people express what they want to the computer, rather than GUI. You have to learn how to "speak" your computer language, which is tedious, but in the end it is easier to bind your computer's will by explaining what you want to do, rather than miming it through the GUI

The other, is that the interface was defined in a restrictive environment, and should evolve to fit better today's technology:

(29-11-2018, 12:33 PM)jkl Wrote: POSIX follows a hardware standard that was outdated thirty years ago. "My" perfect interface would be a sane mixture between (a visually more appealing) Plan 9 and dwm, I guess. I learned to make my peace with the mouse. (However, the default Plan 9 lacks hotkeys, rio's missing ability to spawn a terminal without drawing a window manually can be annoying. I guess Windows has spoiled me.) Imagine an operating system that was built upon a graphical interface instead of wrapping the graphical interface around a text-based system. Many of the architectural problems of Windows "9x" came from the DOS base which couldn't just be replaced.

And as modern server hardware is incredibly powerful, nothing would stop us from using graphical remote control instead of 70s-style ssh. I understand that editing configuration files is mainly a text-only task - but using a computer should not.

Of course, the answer to this topic is not black or white, so please share your opinion!
And please, don't start a flamewar (even though this topic would be a perfect fit for it!)

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