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In The Beginning Was The Command Line

posted by Editor on Wednesday November 14, @12:50PM

Neal Stephenson is best known for his novel Snow Crash, which blended the themes of computer science, biotechnology, religion, and extreme capitalism into a compelling vision of the web's future as a parallel, virtual reality world. In this essay, he argues that most current graphical interfaces abuse the power of metaphor in order to make computers accessible to a larger audience. These interfaces inherently introduce a bias into the computing experience that weakens the ability for users to exploit the computer's real potential, and molds users with cultural influences that are defined by the suppliers of the interface. Since the command line continues to exist as a kind of "brainstem reflex" for the computer, it remains the closest one can reasonably get to the system's core function, which is to manipulate strings of bits. Stephenson has a unique ability to balance interpretations of technology and pop-culture trends, and this piece is an entertaining read, touching on Disney, Microsoft, the Mac-Windows religious wars, BeOS, the Linux phenomenon, and many other topics.

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A great read (Score:0)

by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 20, @05:17AM EST (#1)

I remember about one and a half years ago somebody told me about Stephenson's essay and I downloaded it right away, opened it in a text editor (9pt monospaced font) and started reading. And I read. And read. And read. And read the entire essay, staring at my screen, at the 9pt monospaced letters that formed words that formed sentences that formed paragraphs that were geeky and yet funny, technical and yet philosophical...

I was unable to see properly the next day, everything was kind of blurry, cause I guess I read and re-read for well over 4 hours, glued to the screen.

Yeah, so it makes for good reading/is a good read, and I really think everybody should read it. Everybody that thinks he's a geek, at least.

CLI languages have grammar! (Score:1)

by Bruce Ediger on Tuesday November 20, @08:34AM EST (#2)
(User #21 Info) http://www.users.qwest.net/~eballen1/

Most GUI advocates miss the big fact that a CLI can have a grammar - a format for context around any particular word that augments or changes the meaning of the word. In a Unix "sh" command, the word "cat" could constitute the name of a command, or the name of a file for the command to act on.

Any "grammar" that a GUI has either gets fixed into it by the programmer(s) (for this selection, these buttons get greyed-out) or the users (first click on that, then click on the other). I'm not aware of any mass-market GUI that provides a "grammar" to its users. Sure, firms market products like "LodeRunner" that put a programming language on top of a GUI, but then you're instantly back to the moral equivalent of a command line.

The distinction between "has a grammar" and "doesn't have a grammar" seems trivial at first. Remember your "theory of computation": think of the difference between what format languages you can express with a regular expression versus what languages you can express using even a simple LL(1) language.

GUIs that do not allow a "grammar" will always remain ineffably inexpressive.

I am Spartacus

One more thing about that essay (Score:0)

by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 20, @11:07AM EST (#3)

In the essay Stephenson talks about how computer crashing "breaks the metaphor" and exposes the ugly guts underneath. One thought i would like to add: one of the reasons (or so i've come to understand) that Windows blue-screens for every little error is that- while this breaks the illusion, so to speak- it prevents the metaphor from truly breaking, and keeps the user in ignorant bliss about the "ugly guts underneath"

-Elendale

I'm not a robot like you. I don't like having disks crammed into me... unless they're Oreos, and then only in the mouth. -- Fry