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by piramida 5848 days ago
The more time is spent learning something, the better you can use it later. For consumer software, getting stuff done right now without any prior education is important. For developer tools, learning your tools is a necessity to perform the task better.

If you hide complexity behind a pretty UI, you end up with broken projects when something unexpected happens during push to production and nobody on your team spent time reading the manuals. So what I'm saying, I guess, is that steep learning curve for real tools is a good practice which should not be avoided. You don't want to be operating a chainsaw without reading the manual first.

1 comments

Why do you think a command line interface helps learning more than a GUI one?

In your own language, isn't a CLI simply hiding an API in much the same way a GUI one is?

I used to teach people Linux Volume Management. Far more people understood what they were doing with a visual aid - either in, or outside the app - than those who ran the commands without any context to what was actually happening.