Anil DashLOL I stepped away from Mastodon for a couple hours and everybody is VERY MAD that I made jokes about CLIs. I use them every day, guys, it's gonna be okay. I promise I did not hurt Zork's feelings. It is, however, a factual statement that CLIs are not discoverable user interfaces and they are a poor choice for mainstream audiences; this debate was settled long ago.
synlogic4242@anildash for decades I've been using CLI tools which are highly discoverable, far more than typical GUI apps
David Fleetwood - RG Admin@synlogic4242 @anildash If I put a regular person in front of a CLI for a system they have never used before, they will be utterly lost. I'm glad you can magically know about grep and all, but most people wouldn't know where to begin.
@synlogic4242 @anildash Um, so that helps me find the damn command how exactly?
A system that requires people to memorize large numbers of commands and consult often out of date or untranslated help files (which themselves tend to be written assuming the user is experienced) are the opposite of discoverable.
@reflex @synlogic4242 yeah, -- help after … what, exactly? A random group of characters?
@anildash @reflex if someone can remember what a small arbitrary bitmap icon "means" but not say a 2-5 character word, I dont know what to say about their cognitive skills or ability to function in civ. language (English or Spanish or whatever) is a bedrock skill we all must have, else not sure how an adult can survive. kids & babies, sure
@synlogic4242 @anildash Wow, because a file icon, a save icon, an open icon, etc are totally as incomprehensible as CLI commands.
Insulting the users says more about you than it does about them. Iconography is inherently discoverable, random commands with crazy ass names are not. Iconography literally goes back to the beginnings of human communication.
@reflex @anildash a "floppy disk" icon means nothing unless user has prior knowledge of that as a real world item, and even that generation is dying out. kids wont know, inherently, on day one. just as they dont know what A is, or "apple" is. All of it is icons. Icons all the way down. On that we agree.
@synlogic4242 @anildash Sure, iconography has to be updated and in many cases *is* being updated (Apple has done a lot to make that happen), but it does not change the fact that it's still far more discoverable. Furthermore in Windows there is virtually always a pulldown menu, fully localized, that grants access to the functions by name.