Well, I love cli and do lots of stuff with it, despite liking my shiny kde desktop ;-)

There is some truth in that argument that cli interfaces are somehow obsolete. Imho, that is only the surface of the problem though.

As a matter of fact, computers are becoming more and more important. Many people simply "have" to use them. Especially at work, there is no way avoiding them if your employer wants you to use a computer for business. However, the easy of use is not progressing very quickly. Computers are bound to become devices that simply everybody will use, like people are using telephones today. Thus, computers should be as easy to use as telephones are today. I hope that everybody agrees that dialing a number is much simpler than using a PC or workstation, even if you can do more things with a computer than with a simple telephone. Using computers requires a certain amount if ability that you simply have to learn. Talent is required as well, otherwise you will never be able to do things beyond these you were instructed to. "Computer literacy" required to sophistically use a computer, one has to learn many things. For some of us that is fun, for many others, especially older people, it is not. But even these people need to use computers and it should be as easy as using a telephone.

But here, we have to core of the problem. Computers have to become much more easy to use. From that point of view even the idiot-proof GUIs like that of MacOS/Gnome/KDE/Windows etc. are simply not easy enough. Having a nice display or other means of data output is one thing, but the important part is actually how to tell the computer how to do things. Data and control input are the core problems. Be it CLI or GUI or VR glove, all these things won't work without a certain amount of computer literacy.

My vision of an foolproof computer user interface is based on speech. We simply have to draw an analogy to real life. If you want someone else do something for you then you will normally tell that person. If the task is more complicated you may write it down in a letter, attach plans, diagrams, time tables etc. but all that communication is based on human language. Computers won't be "easy to use" until we make them able to interact with humans in a way that is natural to human beings. The simplest form would be an oral conversation where the user tells the computer what he wants him to do in normal everyday lingo. The computer could then "talk back" if he has questions and so on. The possibilities are countless if we stay focussed on that "as human as possible" principle. Even humanoid robots may play a role in the future.

It is obvious that computers acting like described above need to be much more intelligent than they are today. I think that will be one of the core problems to solve to get rid of the image that computers are "difficult" to use (for untrained people).

People regard a GUI as a step forward to that "human as possible" ideal. And clearly, GUIs can be more simple to use, because we have more ways of displaying informations and more ways of interacting with the computer. Using a mouse to point at things is clearly more "human-like" than typing something into a command line. But compared to my vision, even computers with fancy GUIs like KDE or MacOS are still in the stone age.

Cheers,
Dominik

If speech recognition has the future, so has the command line... or could you imagine saying this to your computer?:
up, up, up, up, left, left, doubleleftclick!

Yes, that's a very good post/article there. I agree with you that computers should become easier to use and that the final ideal solution should be computers with an AI that can understand spoken commands and act upon it.
I also agree that GUI interface may be viewed as one step further to this "human friendlier" interface, but in a way, the same could be said for CLI.

The question is what's so difficult and unfriendly about using CLI. And another question that should also be asked is what's difficult about using GUI. Because GUI also has it's big downfalls in regard to ease of use.

In a GUI, menus, windows and panels can be at various places as well as set up in various ways resulting in various ways of performing an action. This can be very confusing, not to say inefficient, unless you are "computer literate" and customized your GUI yourself which again proves no point for a total computer newbie which wouldn't know how to customize it.

GUI usually does not provide a direct access to performing certain functions, but rather requires you to perform some other actions before you are able to perform the main one. You gotta navigate through menus, find where in the menu a program is and only when you have found it and launched it, you can do what you planned to do with it.

For many programs, CLI actually provides a much simpler way of doing it. Just type in a program name with specified option and activity you want that program to perform. That's much like what you would do if your computer would have an AI and understand your orders, only you wouldn't type it, but only say it out loud. And ok, maybe commands neccessery to speak would be simpler.

The point is that, CLI's can also very well be viewed as a base for future human friendly interface because of it's direct and efficient approach to doing things.

This in no way makes CLI's obsolete and not fit for the modern age. In a contrary, i believe that exactly CLI approach is the one to lead to speech commanded computers where speech will replace typing and current, a bit complicated commands will be higly simplified with "general human understandable commands".

Here is one nice example: Gentoo portage. (complexity of the rest of gentoo system aside). All you need to do to actually install something is type "emerge " and you're on your way. Now, what if instead of typing it, you would just say it out loud. For example, you want to install GIMP. You would only speak out, "emerge GIMP".

Replace the "emerge" command with simple, understandable and most used "install" command and all you have to do to install GIMP would be to say: "install gimp". You're done.

You can see how exactly CLI can be the future, only with further simplification of commands and replacing typing with speech. :-)

And actually, i preffer the mixture of both (what else). I always like to have terminal emulators (emulating CLI) in my GUI interface. And i believe that exactly this combination would be popular in the future as well (cause you really need GUI to design graphics for example..)..

Thank you
Daniel

How nice, you proved my point in just one funny sentence while i had to write a whole article upthere for it

Oh well..

If you want very fast system information, or you need to resize 850 photos from your last trip to paradise, for a web gallery the command line is the sweatest thing around.

I want it always, no matter what linux distro. :-D

Me as well, but i also want GUI too. And i don't consider neither to be obsolete at all. The combination of both works great. :-)