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> Yes, the usage of these things on the command line tends to be "arcane", but that's because each is encoding its own problem domain. Not necessarily. I came to believe lately that Git for instance, has beautiful, simple, and powerful core principles… and an unacceptably crappy user interface. A hashed DAG of commits with a few pointers to navigate it, that's great. But the magic incantation that you're required to type on the command line are too complex, unintuitive, inconsistent… and intellectually utterly uninteresting. Git's core model is the interesting part, the one that will make you a better programmer, or computer user, or whatever it is you want to do that involves version control. But the specifics of the command line interface? That's neither interesting nor a portable skill. "Command line bullshitery" is a perfect term to describe it. Why I believe that has been said better than I can ever do here: http://tonsky.me/blog/reinventing-git-interface/ Seriously, even "end losers" could use this. I also believe this can be generalised: some software just isn't usable through the command line. For day to day interactive use, it needs a neat, special purpose graphical user interface —Bret Victor has taught us how powerful they can be. The command line is still invaluable when interacting with other software, or for automation. Then it should be designed for those, not for interactive use. Simply put, it should be an API —which you could use to build your wonderful GUI on top of. |