Splat | WiseTome.com

I must have been in my sixth grade when my dad got me a computer. It was a 386 DX 66 MHz assemble PC, which came with DOS 6.2. It had 512 MB hard disk and 4 MB ram. I know, it is quite lowly specifications - but it was a novelty to have PC in those days, and I was the only kid in the block to have a computer at home.

I look back at the time, more than a decade before from today, and the thing that strikes me the most, is the command line Operating System that I have gotten quite used to. I still use it today at my job, albeit on a Unix terminal, and I find it quite useful.

Command Line Interface (CLI), is contrary to the GUI - Graphical User Interface that is used to communicate with the computer. The CLI was the only way one could communicate with computers in early history. Gradually, as the processing power of computers increased, GUIs could be designed to replace the CLI.

This evolution from CLI to GUI also let more people use the computers, and soon the computers became personal computers - or PCs - and could be used by almost everyone who had minor literacy in computers. But some people still were stuck to CLIs - administrators, system programmers and developers.

CLI, in spite of being a rudimentary system gives great power to the user. And as the flexibility and power given to the user is more, naturally it is more difficult to master it.

Even today, I find some of the tasks, like impromptu report generation or process control to be much easier than the same being done in a GUI. It increases my productivity and also increases the chances of being called a geek.

Some of the disadvantages of CLIs:

• Commands are hard to remember
• GUIs provide intuitive structure that is easier to follow and understand

On the other hand, once the commands are learned for a particular CLI, it gives a lot of advantages:

• CLIs allows humans to use language skills that would otherwise limit to pointing and clicking
• Repetitive task can be performed in loops in a CLIs that would otherwise take hours to complete in a GUI.
• CLIs can be used to interface different scripts and programs on demand, and not require enormous setups in GUI

I think that CLIs stand by their resourcefulness in many scenarios, and the choice between using CLI or GUI should be made based on the task at hand and the comfort level of the user.

What do you think?