In the Beginning was the Command Line

Yesterday, while finding a way to lose my time early in the morning checking my Google Reader account, one of my coworkers (Juan) showed me one of the books he is reading, "Accelerando" by Charles Stross. What started as a 'Hey, look at this funny part' ended in Juan giving me pointers to some great books that I shall read, including an essay written by Neal Stephenson titled like this post. You can get it here.

Now, that is what I call an interesting read. The essay goes with a bit of background on history, like Billy's great idea of tricking people into buying an intangible type of products called Software. Then it goes about the Windows vs Mac wars, the idea of GUIs and the metaphors used on them, why it is not so hip being a hardware company these days, his experience when he was Enlightened with Linux and finishes with some weird analogies about computers creating instances of universes, life, and stuff and how it would get to people wanting a GUI for a Life Generator software for such computer (this I really liked).

What we see here is one of the most important aspects of the human nature:

1. Good Laziness
2. Bad Laziness

Good Laziness is... well... good. This is the kind of laziness that makes you find better ways NOT to do boring/repetitive things. This is what gets into you those saturday mornings when the world seems a very dull place. This is what makes you do invent weird interesting things that you would otherwise never have done in the first place. The problem with Good Laziness to most people is that it normally requires you to know/want to learn things, and this is where the problem lies.

People don't want to learn. People want to watch porn use computers, but people don't want to know what a computer is. People want water, but they are not thirsty. People want to speak their minds, but they don't think.

This is also the reason GUIs where invented. GUIs provide a comfortable abstraction of the inner workings of the black box that is your computer, which is good, but most of the time, they just get in the way. GUIs limit what you can do with your computer. Remember this the next time you want to do something with your computer that no GUI designer
ever thought you would want to do.

Why people don't want to learn? Bad Laziness.

Bad Laziness is the kind of recursive force with inertia that stops you from doing things. Yes, Laziness has inertia, people tend to preserve their state of laziness or boredom. Recursive? Hell Yes, you feel so lazy that you don't get to do anything because you are too lazy to do something about your current laziness level.

In the other side of the fight with the GUI we have the Command Line. The Command Line is like a big, nuclear powered, automatic hammer with little gold decorations on the side. You can do whatever you want to do with the command line, unless you are stuck with MS-DOS (in which case, your life probably sucks), but it requires you to know certain rules and what you want to do. It's like having a conversation with your computer: you say 'i want this', the computer says 'yes, master... here is your result'. Easy!, you don't have to lose time clicking, dragging or explaining what clicking and dragging is to another human. You just type what you want, and you get it, but you have to be careful because you will get what you want.

Why is this so? Because every human being in this unregarded little green-blue planet knows the answer to what they want (the results), but that same human being may not know how to ask the question to the machine, or what the hell the question is. That human being is also suffering from severe terror of asking what the question is.

The Point? The command line is your friend, learn how to use it, and use it well. If you don't know, ask people around. You won't regret it.

This is my first real post here, so this is probably buggy/inconsistent/pure nonsense so please submit your bug reports and I promise to fix them in the next release.