[mschaef]

> The older I get, the more our devotion to the CLI feels like gatekeeping.

Nah... you can't take one of the handful of major styles of interaction with computing devices and diminish adherence to that style as just 'gatekeeping'. There are moments where the strengths of GUI interaction is useful (discovery of options, selection of individual objects, etc.), but modern systems are complex and large enough that you can't really walk away from the idea of expressing operations and state linguistically without walking away from tools you need to do your job efficiently (or at all). So yeah, maybe CLI is less accessible and more difficult for newcomers, but the problems they solve aren't necessarily easy, either.

However... I do think there are many opportunities for both better accessibility in CLI's and better interoperability between CLI's and GUI's. Better discovery of options in CLI would help (autocomplete, etc.), as would a better connection between the GUI and CLI worlds. (Lisp has some good ideas where the "terminal" remembers the object it prints and allows interaction with those objects, as opposed to just remembering a string character representation of them. Microsoft's Office applications similarly will write macro code for you as you interact with the UI - which is a great way to understand the relationship between the two worlds.)