[stragulus]

In my similarly long experience, I have discovered that it's OK if the tools that you use nearly every day are "arcane", whether they have a GUI or not. Any time invested in getting to learn the tools will be paid back in efficiency later down the road.

As a simple example; an avid gimp user will not click through menus for most of the common actions, but will rather use keyboard shortcuts. It is no different for any CLI environment where you need to memorize a bunch of programs.

It certainly would be nice if your very first early start would focus more on the actual programming, and less on the weird abstract environment that most of us work in. But once you're hooked on programming, and that probably happens quite fast if you are into it, I find it hard to believe that you would not be willing to spend time to optimize your tool usage. The CLI does not get in your way there at all IMHO. The old unix philosophy of having a bunch of very simple tools that do one thing well and can be combined, is very useful in the day to day working environment.