

What’s wrong with GUIs - edw519
http://crustyoldfart.wordpress.com/2008/06/16/whats-wrong-with-guis/

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makecheck
I agree with the article's points.

I tend to wonder if the state of GUIs isn't as simple as "too many developers
use Windows and don't look elsewhere". Windows ships with a lousy shell and
not many decent commands to build with. If most developers follow that example
and don't try to learn anything else, they'll be "comfortable" even in
inefficient programming environments.

The Mac's an anomaly...the current OS has great command support, and while the
older Mac OS didn't, its _developers_ had access to the excellent MPW Shell.
MPW Shell had features that Unix-like systems still can't match, such as the
ability to assign significance to many more characters. (When the system makes
it easy to enter "weird" symbols, the idea of turning them into shell
metacharacters is pretty cool!)

A good book on the way developers think (on Unix-like systems), is ESR's "The
Art of UNIX Programming". It has great examples of how many of us would
approach system and application design, that don't seem prevalent on other
systems.

