From: bcoleman@hayes.com (Bill Coleman)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.advocacy
Subject: Re: When is a CLI faster than a GUI?
Date: 28 Sep 92 10:46:56 EDT
Organization: Hayes Microcomputer Products, Norcross, GA

In article <YelNiLW00VAt8Dqm4L@andrew.cmu.edu>, fj05+@andrew.cmu.edu (Faisal Nameer Jawdat) writes:
> 
> and most people who claim GUI's are faster take for granted the fact
> that i'd like to do something besides play with the finder all day,

The Finder is just one example. Most of the CLI superiority examples
that appear to the posted deal with file manipulation. If you want to
compare that aspect, you are dealing with the Finder.

People don't "play with the Finder all day." I spent most of my time in
other applications.

> and the learning curve is there, it's just you're doing it with pretty
> icon's and not nasty % signs 

The other factor with graphical user interface is that they are based on
previous learning. Manipulating things with the mouse is an extension of
manipulating objects in the real world. Differing applications act in 
similar ways. 

"Pretty icons" has little or nothing to do with it. You're just looking at
the surface, it goes much deeper than that?

> - a cli is not for a beginning user but
> for an advanced user to do anything significant in a GUI requires so
> much more work than you waste learning a CLI 

This is simply not true. Graphic user interface do not require "more work."
That's foolish. Any interface that requires "more work" would be inferior.

> - because this is the os
> we're dealing with - any app has to be a GAI or it's almost useless,
> but the os can be CLI based because that gives it a lot of flexibility

GAI?

Operating Systems could care less what kind of user interface they have.
Making an operating system using a particular type of interface has nothing
to do with flexibility. 

Indeed, OSs are created to support particular interfaces, not the other
way around.

> and aliasing makes it easy to solve the oft quoted seldom
> seen spelling problem (i type ahead, and usually delete before i see
> it on screen because i know what i typed without looking)

I do this too, and I still spell things wrong. And aliasing won't help
you one bit if it is the filename or other command options you happen to
make a mistake on. 

> i'd give extreme odds on figuring out how to program text manipulation
> on any machine, but it would take a lot longer on the mac
> another advantage of the CLI:  easier for people to learn to program
> for

I don't think it is any easier to learn. I think it is easier to program, 
because the programs DO LESS.

Actually, the easiest programming is that which doesn't look like C or Pascal
or BASIC at all. The easiest programming is the kind of stuff you see
when you can draw exactly what you want on the screen. Or do something
once by example and then have the computer repeat it (perhaps with some
modification). And guess what? this kind of programming isn't available on
CLI computers. Only graphic computers with graphic user interfaces.

> GUI requires much more programming effort than writing for a cli,
> and to do something you could do on a cli with no knowledge of programming

I doubt you could do anything useful on a CLI computer with "no knowledge
of programming." I worked in a user assistance office in college. We had
plenty of otherwise intelligent engineering students who never did get
the hang of the CLI-based computer.

> I've been playing with DOS since 7th grade, unix since last year

Obviously, you've had lots of intense training and indoctrination in the
CLI way of doing things.

> And I know plenty of people (the novices that you say GUI's are best
> suited for), that upon seeing the question "drive unreadable:
> initialize?" relating to their hard drive on the mac, have gone ahead
> and hit OK

Great story. Except there's no such message from the Macintosh for your
hard disk. 

Of course, I could tell stories of how people formatted their IBM XT
hard disks by typing FORMAT and hitting return. (Used to be, if you
specified FORMAT without a drive, it would use the default drive. And
since C: was not a removable disk, there's no reason to give the
"press any key when read" prompt, is there? Oops)

>> Oops!  You've just removed all your source instead of your object
>> files!  
>
> and this is just as possible with a GUI

Yup. But in the case of graphic UIs, you simply drag the mistakes out
of the trash, or select UNDO. Much more tolerant.

-- 
Bill Coleman, AA4LR                ! CIS: 76067,2327    AppleLink: D1958
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Disclaimer: "My employer doesn't pay me to have opinions."
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Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.advocacy