Siri and alexa? You tell it what to do in pretty darned close to human language

Good answer! (but I prefer typing language with a keyboard, instead of saying it out loud, as I'm not a native English speaker and it feels very unnatural to me).

Yet, is it possible to use siri or alexa for all your computing needs? Can you copy files around, convert a few images from tiff to jpg, download, compile and set up a nginx web server, hack a bit the code of the server and recompile, etc.? Because I can do all of that from the comfort of my "obsolete" command line.

I would love the option of being able to tell my computer to do things like this some day.

But you already have this option, it's called "xterm + bash"

By speaking, not typing.

I use my terminal and shell all day. :P

Human-Computer Interfaces have different needs from Human-Human interaction, in particular they need to be unambiguous (which the natural language isn't), very precise and concise. For these reasons Siri and Alexa would be terrible to perform tasks which would be very quick in a shell. Also Siri and Alexa are not local and not privacy respecting.

They are very imprecise, and they cannot fit on your desk. The device is just a speaker, but the actual computer is in a data center elsewhere.

This is a great example, but is still horribly limited in functionality. I use my Google home constantly, but I've built a mental model of its limitations and am still frustrated by the "latency" involved when my model assumes it can do something it can't.

Hopefully we're getting there though!

Yes, the REPL as used at Xerox PARC, while Bell Labs was busy with troff.

Don't you have a modern example? I thought you were despising 80s technology.

UNIX is still busy trying to catch up with 70's world from Parc Place, and apparently the 80's UNIX world is what UNIX aficionados want to stay on.

No need for more modern examples.

But what is there for power users today? AFAIK Unix is the only viable option from a very pragmatic point of view. So it's not about being aficionados, it's about being pragmatic.

The millions of users using IDEs, Jupiter notebooks and tablets disagree.

Most of them have no effective way of automating their work.

Every piece of software (Excel? Word? Outlook? Autocad? Photoshop?) has its own system of automation if it has one at all, with many of the skills complicated to learn on one hand, and not transferable on the other. On tablets, automation is essentially nonexistent.

Whereas on Unix, there's a mostly-unified system of automation (shell), with mostly transferable knowledge.

If there is nothing in your work that benefits from automation, you wouldn't care. But you'd also be rather special, IME - most people spend a lot of time on recurring and automatable actions they gain no benefit from repeating manually.

IDEs for scripting languages with graphical REPL.

I am not an expert of *NIX OS, but in my two years of learning the philosophy of the OS I noticed that almost every implementation of a GUI concept or idea has it origin from CLI, the GUI is just a manner of automating things in a way that once you know what to write to the computer to do what you want to achieve, that task remains in the form of that button, but again in my opinion a button is just another abstraction of an "alias" in the CLI for a command or just a text file whit a script, it is useful for some cases to have buttons, for example editing a video in CLI is not a optimal choice for that task, I mean you can but probably will take you much more time, specially if you don't know the tool, but in the other hand, almost every video editing GUI app uses "ffmpeg" ( a CLI app and library) as it backed, so probably learning ffmpeg will teach you how to use almost every app of video editing out there. Text editing in my opinion is so slow in a GUI except for some programs like emacs, gvim and others (but whit proper extensions), and with a bit of knowledge you can achieve the same or maybe if you are persistent and develop the love for the CLI a more powerful "button" for your development environment that fits exactly your needs, and it immediately gives you more freedom, you never will to wait until the next version of your spyder or what ever IDE out there to make something you want to do, and if it fails you know how to fix it because you wrote it, that said, REPL came from "SLIME" that means "Superior Lisp Interaction Mode for Emacs", ergo, emacs users have been using REPL long time ago before, even before spyder or any "modern" IDE we actually have, that said, there is a plugin for vim too called vim-slime inspired by SLIME, where you can send words, lines, block or whole text files from your editor to other app, lets say tmux, your browser or any others, so vim, vim-slime plugin, tmux and a script to send text from your editor to shell executing python or ipython3 console or python-qtconsole gives you the REPL feature that is so acclaimed these days, and I want to say that since I implemented it for python development until now, it never crashed, so really I do not miss nothing from any IDE out there jeje, I hope some one who read this out there, expanded his main a bit and break some limitations with these little tip!. I'm currently changing mi mind for a better life in the shell, so any useful resource you want share with me or correction to me, will be received gracefully.

> graphical REPL

Those are useful and beautiful, but they are particular cases of "command lines", aren't they? A bit limited, in that they are only useful for developing on that IDE, and not as a general interface for your computer, but useful command lines nonetheless. I thought you were opposed to command lines.