[frossie]

How many people do you know, whose job title does not start with computer and/or IT and/or sysadmin, actually use the terminal?

Loads. They are called working scientists. Sometimes there is a perception that the world is divided into geeks and "appliance" users. There is actually a non-trivial amount of grey area in between.

[glhaynes]

Why do those scientists have to use the terminal?

Not a snarky question: I'm not very familiar with scientific computing and am curious (from a UI perspective) why, say, applications for office work manage to keep things essentially all in the GUI, but apps used by scientists can't. Is the problem that scientific apps don't devote enough resources to good/comprehensive UI or is it that what scientists do is better done from a command line?

Regardless: as I said elsewhere in this thread, this is why I'm starting to think of PCs/Macs as the workstations of this era. There will always be a need for them. But they're probably needlessly complex for most uses.

[frossie]

To answer your question, there's a number of reasons. Undoubtedly some do just come down to "historical reasons" but there are many reasons why a command-line is actually the right choice. The main reason is that the scientist wants to run a very specialised analysis of her data, and so is almost certainly either running custom code, or at least code that was developed in an academic environment. Creating GUIs that are flexible enough to cover all the things somebody might do with their data is a complex and time consuming task, and does not directly produce "science". It is a lot easier to use the command line to interact with your dataset. Moreover you often don't know what you want to do in advance ("if we knew where we were going, we would't call it reasearch"). Therefore a typical user may fiddle around with the command line trying to get the most out of their data, and then string it all together in a script - so again, a command line makes a good prototyping environment.

Certainly in my area (astronomy) I have seen some attempts to provide gui based intefaces to data reduction, and even mocked up a few myself; but the effort to reward ratio isn't worth it - especially since you are dealing with people who can, in general, follow instructions.

Also, do not underestimate the higher effiency of the commandline - after all, there is a good reason we all use it. Even if there was a system administration gui out there, would most sysadmins use it? It's actually faster to type.

I think the "appliance" model of computing (eg. iPhone/iPad) is perfectly valid for a good percentage of the population at least for some of the time, but it won't render "classic" computers obsolete.

I also have to say that personally, I have generally been dissatisfied with attempts to disguise or flatten the filesystem by, for example, using tags instead. I actually think pretty damn hierarchically, so I often organise my material as IF it was a filesystem, when the application will allow me to do so - maybe it's just me?

[glhaynes]

Excellent answer, thanks, and I think my (also-hierarchically-inclined) gut agrees with your last paragraph: if you're gonna expose a complex filesystem to the user (and, for many usages, that's a good thing), hierarchical — with metadata/content indexing for fast querying — is probably the way to go. I'd like to hear of situations in this area where people think a tag system is/would be better than the hierarchy+index system, though.

[niels_olson]

well, I'm a doc; I and every other doc in the military use a ncurses-like system on a VT500-7 emulator hundreds of times a day because it's insanely fast compared to the slick java/IE7 GUI that the gubm'n't spent $20B to write (AHLTA, look it up. Tons of money for you if you can beat it. Would be willing to help).

[glhaynes]

Ahh, thanks! I was thinking of terminal usage as being synonymous with shell usage, when, of course, there are many users of character-mode apps that never see a shell.

An iPad running a terminal emulator and with a keyboard attached would be a comparable experience. Though, clearly, it's not the best solution for most such users. Linux/etc all the way for that.