| of course it is good to know the full range of flexible tools, but it's far from obvious to most people whether or not find | xargs grep is good or not, or how to do a method rename It's also far from obvious whether a for or a while loop best fits the problem at hand. How does one figure these things out? By learning about the tools/constructs and using them (experience). Furthermore, it is expected of software developers to know these things. It's all well and good to be an IDE jockey, but being a software developer entails more than clicking through wizards and filling in some logic. Learning tools (such as UNIX CLI tools) opens up a whole other world of untold power in accomplishing not just programming tasks, but everyday tasks as well (how many people know that there is a CLI unit conversion program that not only has more units than you can shake a stick at, but is scriptable and has a tiny footprint to boot?). Not to mention that these tools have been around and ported to just about everything, and will probably continue to be around for ever, and eat less RAM and CPU while being more flexible and powerful than their GUI counterparts. Edit: I didn't mean to come off condescending and scolding, but I forgot to insert some helpful links in response to your statement that there should be better evangelism/PR for shell programming; hope these links fit the bill: http://www.bashoneliners.com http://www.commandlinefu.com http://www.shell-fu.org http://noone.org/blog/English/Computer/Debian/CoolTools http://noone.org/blog/English/Computer/Shell |
I find that IDEs make everything so needlessly complex and inflexible - I don't want 2000 little icons in 200 drawers managed by 54 XML files that I will eventually be expected to edit.
The observation is that they are winning anyway. In fact, people even think they are easier, AND they think their IDE does things that can't even be done otherwise! These people are smart enough to develop software, yet they are opting for what we think are dumb tools. Either we are just wrong, or there is just a misunderstanding about the relative easiness of IDEs.
I think that commercial platforms and products aimed at consumers (including developers) tend to have people paying careful attention to marketing and experience, to add a layer of glitz and wow and accessibility. It isn't that it could not be done but no one is bothering, once you know the efficient way then there is no point dressing it up.
I also think we have built up a culture which is somewhat punitive to newbies. Too many people treat programming and composition of command line tools as some kind of dick swinging competition rather than the inherently simplest and most straightforward way of doing things, which is SUPPOSED TO make your life easier and let you do things you couldn't otherwise do.