Terminology 101: Intuition, ease of learning 3300

snips

On Sun, 05 Mar 2006 21:22:50 -0500, Tim Murray

I'll agree with most of this, but it completely neglects one critical aspect of the whole thing.

Is a GUI more intuitive? Sure. More retainable? Suppose that depends on the person, more than anything, but sure.

Here's the part that's missing: once you've gotten past the learning curve on each, which makes it easier to do arbitrarily complex tasks?

The CLI wins that one, hands down - buttuming you have a "rich" CLI environment, like Linux has, but unlike Windows has.

Once you reach a certain point, GUI-based tools become, on the whole, a hindrance rather than a help in getting more complex tasks done, quickly and efficiently.

That was the crux of the whole Snot discussion and the example I gave; there was simply no way in hell he was going to perform that task anywhere near as easily with his GUI tools as I could with my CLI tools.

"Easy" is context-dependent. A novice, sitting down at a computer, will very likely find the GUI easier to use. An expert, sitting down at a computer, trying to get a non-trivial task done, preferrably in such a way it can be later automated and simply left to do its thing, is not going to find the GUI easier to use. Though this does, of course, depend on the nature of the task, as well.

Is it *possible* for GUI tools to achieve the kind of power and flexibility that CLI tools do? Perhaps. They're nowhere near it, yet, though - so if you're into the realm of tasks where GUIs fall on their faces, "easy" need not apply; they're fundamentally useless for the job at that point, never mind making it easy.

-- MS, because work should be measured by effort, rather than result.