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From: Salvador Mirzo <smirzo@example.com>
Newsgroups: comp.misc
Subject: the command line is language (Was: Re: Schneier, Data and Goliath: no hope for privacy)
Date: Wed, 26 Feb 2025 21:46:56 -0300
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Mike Spencer <mds@bogus.nodomain.nowhere> writes:

> D Finnigan <dog_cow@macgui.com> writes:
>
>> On 2/25/25 8:08 PM, Rich wrote:
>> 
>>> The prior can also largely be blamed on modern GUI OS'es.  They've
>>> reached the point where the unknowing can make use of a computer
>>> without ever needing a command line at any point.
>> 
>> Which meant that computer hardware and software vendors could thus 
>> market their wares to a much larger consumer audience.
>
> Just so.  But doesn't address the bizarre observation that PhDs in
> computer-related domains are utterly unaware of the command line.
>
>       The command line is like language.
>
>       The GUI is like shopping.
>
> Reports from a very different domain (sorry, I forget the URLs) are
> to the effect that university-level teachers of language & literature
> find that students are wholly unprepared to read whole, long novels.
> They just don't get it.  Somehow, despite having reached postsecondary
> level, they don't have the attention span -- or can't call up the
> intellectual resources to invoke the attention span -- to read
> attentively something that goes on for a few hundred pages.
>
> A friend and fellow blacksmith -- sadly now deceased -- was very bright
> and very skilled but recounted an experience from high school.
> Assigned to read a novel -- I forget but I think it was Count of Monte
> Christo -- he just couldn't get through it.  So he bought the Coles
> Notes (or similar) version and still ran aground.  Then he happened
> on the comic book version, bought and read that, got a passing grade on
> the review he had to write.
>
> All well.  There are differing kinds of intelligence and his strength
> lay in spatial relations and tangible physical forms, not language.
>
> But people taking a university-level Great Books course are a
> different matter.  So are people studying how computers operate.
> Language is a fundamental intellectual tool.  Shopping, stichomythia,
> ideas reduced to 168-char squibs and, yes, shopping look to me like
> degenerate forms of disciplined thinking.
>
> As a digression, an assignment left for the reader, consider the
> command line, even one as intimidating as that for gcc.  After decades
> of change, with the accretion of a multitude of options, it retains
> the same linguistic form of a command.
>
> But how do you get along with a GUI for something of similar
> complexity when someone 20 or 30 or 40 years your junior, decides that
> a complete redesign of of the GUI is a desirable and necessary
> improvement?  He grew up in a mental Manhattan or a Mental Tokyo,
> demolishes the graphical Boston of your favorite tool and rebuilds it
> to match his visual head-space.
>
> So you can learn it all over again.  Life-long learning is supposed to
> be about learning new stuff, but about learning the same stuff over
> and over.

I'm sorry for a follow-up with very little to add, but you really said
everything.  The command line is language.  And, yes, it turns out we
have an entire population who don't master much language at all.  And I
equate language with thinking.  If you're thinking, you're using
language.  I think of calculational steps, for example, as sentence
rewriting.  For example, how do we solve the equation

  x^2 - 3x + 2 = 0?

We first rewrite it to

  (x - 1)(x - 2) = 0.

It's as if we're saying---I don't know how to solve the problem, but I
know how to rewrite it.  And then I do some more rewriting to the point
that the rewriting falls under the so-called solution.

Anyway, this lack of intellectual abilities, which boils down to
language, grammar skills has crept up even in the computer science
graduate group, which is appalling.