| On the use of the command line by the "technically unwashed", another presumptuous label by an HN commenter 1. Before the GUI existed http://www.snobol5.com/s4_history_1981.pdf "We deliberately tried to produce a language that would be suitable for the person who was not primarily a programmer." https://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/univOfCalBerkeley/Cal_SNOBOL4_... "This presentation of Snobol4 is particularly designed for members of the University of California community who have no previous knowledge of computers or computer programming."^FN1 https://www2.cs.arizona.edu/icon/docs/humanit.htm SNOBOL and Icon were used by "technically unwashed" students in the humanities and other liberal arts majors. At least two books were published on such usage: https://archive.org/download/SNOBOL_programming_for_the_huma... https://web.archive.org/web/20110717172642if_/http://www2.cs... 2. After GUIs became popular https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/authors/glazier/essays/occlusi... https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/authors/glazier/mayapan/mayapi... https://web.archive.org/web/19990202211132/http://www.dsu.ed... 3. Personal experience: eyewitness accounts I saw "technically unwashed" high school students use the command line on a TRS-80 owned by a maths teacher; the teacher required the students to use the computer I saw "technically unwashed" university students in a political science course use the UNIX command line on a VAX Even after GUIs had become common, in the mid 1990s, I saw a university issue UNIX accounts to all students, including the "technically unwashed" A common theme was that in each case the "technically unwashed" were required to use the command line. It was not optional. In each case, they had no trouble using it. FN1. The SNOBOL implementation at UCB was written by Charles Simonyi who later worked for Xerox PARC and went on to introduce Bill Gates to the GUI, OOP, Hungarian notation and create predecessors for Word and Excel for Microsoft. The original SNOBOL interpreter was the first to use associative arrays, pre-dating AWK. The idea came from McIlroy. It influenced and inspired many techniques used in programming projects today, e.g., https://www.lua.org https://snowballstem.org The later is, e.g., used in PostgreSQL full-text search. I still use the Dewar SPITBOL interpreter today. https://web.archive.org/web/20000816232235/http://www.dsu.ed... https://web.archive.org/web/19990202211132/http://www.dsu.ed... Icon, i.e., icont and iconx, still compile cleanly on Linux. I get 148 KiB and 318.1 KiB static binaries, respectively. |