[camgunz]

CLIs and GUIs aren’t an either/or proposition. They each implement very different paradigms; OP goes over them pretty reasonably. You’re not supposed to discover a CLI; you’re either supposed to remember the 4 things you do all the time (see git) or script it and build your own interface/program (see coreutils or stuff like troff). It’s an entirely different UI. Arguing that CLIs aren’t discoverable misses the point just as much as arguing that GUIs aren’t composable. They’re not supposed to be.

[hhas01]

“CLIs shouldn’t be discoverable because they’re not supposed to be discoverable.”

Imagine if we applied the same defeatist tautological thinking to our other written materials: books wouldn’t have TOCs or indexes, the Web wouldn’t have search engines, and so on.

10,000 years of the written word, yet nothing is learnt. SMH.

Maybe if text-based interfaces did provide good, safe discovery they wouldn’t have been beaten into a cocked hat by GUIs for 99% of users. And this is despite GUI being something of a UX trap itself (as CLI fans are happy to point out), becoming ever moreso as personal computing moves beyond traditional physical point-and-click and expands into voice control.

Honestly, there’s more text smarts in a modern smartphone’s txt-ing interface than in today’s “cutting edge” of 1970s CLI design.

Is it really about providing good UI/UX, or about preserving the entrenched power structures of the computing world status quo?

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“It’s a curious thing about our industry: not only do we not learn from our mistakes, we also don’t learn from our successes.”—Keith Braithwaite

[camgunz]

It's not a tautology, it's choosing how something works. Try it with other things:

"Guitars shouldn't have reeds because they're not supposed to have reeds"

"Cars shouldn't have pitch controls because they're not supposed to have pitch controls"

> Maybe if text-based interfaces did provide good, safe discovery they wouldn’t have been beaten into a cocked hat by GUIs for 99% of users.

This isn't so much CLI vs. GUI but interactive vs. non-interactive. Think CLI vs. TUI. Then (hopefully, I guess) you'll realize that it's a deliberate difference in paradigm vs. one or the other being superior.

Indeed, this is the entire point of OP. Reification of the interaction means making that interaction first-class, and CLIs do this by making the interaction the invocation, which you can then manipulate. You can't (mostly, w/o some kind of session scripting tool or w/e) do that in a GUI or TUI.

Kind of a lot of heated discussion about this but, it doesn't seem like it's that big a deal.