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The Command Line Is Outdated

November 23rd, 2011 subogero Comments off

The command line has been outdated for 20 years.

This is the claim I heard yesterday from a colleague, along with a statement that he needs useable interfaces. The revelation came during a discussion about git vs MKS Source Integrity*.

Why, one might ask, comes Windows 8 Server, for the first time in history, without a GUI?  Why do retarded Linux freaks still claim that the command line is way more effective than any GUI?

The shocking answer is that, surprisingly, the command line is our natural way of communication since the dawn of the human race. We have an organ to form and send text streams. It’s called the mouth. We have another pair of organs that receive text streams. The ears, ladies and gentlemen. We also have a way of batch-processing these messages. Some would call it reading and writing. Others call it literacy.

That’s the reason that, against all odds, the only remaining paradigm of the last half century of computing is Unix, which embraced TEXT as its core value. Everything is a file, in other words a stream of characters, text.

What is the very essence of the C language, the ultimate superclass of all superclasses, which is compatible with everything by definition? It’s this, the pointer to the universal byte stream:

void *

And we’ve just arrived to the most crucial question. Why do so many people still despise the command line? Exactly. Because it involves learning languages.

But come on! By the age of two, everybody has learned one. It’s not that difficult. Of course, we all start with GUIs. We click our toys. We play with the mother of all GUIs, our Mom’s b… erm… buttons.

But as time passes, our parents watch with ecstatic joy as we form our first text streams. They tell their friends about it. Then we go to school and what do we learn first? Scripting.

I’ll go further. The command line is older than the human race. Text is more universal than the universe.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

Chew on that, you serial clickers.

* Some would propose a better name: MKS Source Disintegration.

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