Re:Darling – MacOS translation layer for Linux
by swiley on Wednesday November 02, 2016 @02:34PM
(#12857864)
I don't know, language seems fairly intuitive but it's not in style. The only people who really struggle with it are illiterate. (ex: very young children) In those situations you really do need a special UI that will be frustrating for normal people.
Re:Darling – MacOS translation layer for Linux
by toufka on Wednesday November 02, 2016 @02:44PM
(#12857957)
That's a strong criticizm. There are a lot of equally valid linguistic ways to view the contents of a directory. But only one grammatical and lexical way to command the computer to do it with text.
'Open folder', 'show contents', 'see items', why does 'ls' make more sense? It certainly has nothing to do with literacy.
Re:Darling – MacOS translation layer for Linux
by swiley on Wednesday November 02, 2016 @02:50PM
(#12858016)
The same can be said for GUIs though, look at how different mobile GUIs and desktop GUIs are. It's actually a real problem that people think their GUI is intuitive, they never end up documenting it. CLI app authors know this and are forced to face reality and at least write usage text.
Re:Darling – MacOS translation layer for Linux
by lmm on Thursday November 03, 2016 @05:54AM
(#12862640)
GUI tends to be more discoverable - in the worst case you can simply click through all the menus and see what all the available commands are. That tends not to be the case with a CLI - the man page requires a context switch and tends to go on for dozens of pages, some programs have good '--help' output but many do not.
I like text interfaces as much as the next nerd, but most people want to interact with a computer intuitively: see a thing and interact with that thing.
In other words, "point and click". (Or just "point" if it's a touchscreen.)
My 2 year old doesn't know the first thing about computers, but he'll jab his finger at the screen when he sees something he likes.