It’s 2021. People use their phone for everything. The Google Pixel now just lets you double tap the main button to pull up the voice interface. No one is thumbing shit into their phone interfaces unless they have to. This is the age of the conversational user interface, of assistants that listen to us constantly and (finally) do what we want. Gone are the constraints of terimal input (even though terminal input is just text). Gone are shitty menu-driven graphic interfaces. It’s a speakable, search-centric world. Thank God! It’s about time.
And yet, for some dumb-ass reason we continue to complicate command options with dashes and stuff no speech processor would ever understand.
The only thing that distinguishes a terminal command line from a voice-able user interface is the ability to generate text from speech (which every phone and computer provides these days) and the developer design decision to create speech-friendly command line interfaces. This is why knowingly creating any interface in 2021 that requires dashes and obscure letters and unpronoucable underscores is just so fucking stupid.
It’s just a matter of time before the world wakes up and gets tired of translating speech commands (from Slack bots, for example, which have sales people using the command line without even knowing it) into their bullshit horrible dash and double-dash equivalents. This is the reason Cobra is such shit. It promotes these ancient ways of interacting with the computer via the command line.
The tragety is that these gpg-like monstrosities came about because of
constraints of the computer and terminal interface from the 70s. A lot
of good things came from the 70s, cryptic, unintelligible command line
application interfaces were not one of them. Someone decided — quite
arbitrarily — that the world would forever suffer from dash-syndrome
and we have paid for it ever since. The man page is literally
a response to the dumb-ass decision to make interfaces as
counter-intuitive as possible.
This shit needs to fucking die. The word needs software developers and designers to have to courage to stand up and say, “No. This sucks. No one will remember this.”
Linus Torvalds was one of the first with git. He had the courage to
buck tradition and put several applications into a single monolith
while maintaining the spirit of the UNIX philosophy to “do one thing
well and have it integrate.” He just didn’t have the courage to say how
shitty dashed options are, because he is an engineer. His decision has
spawned the new normal for monolith utility applications such as
docker, kubectl and a host of others. He made it okay because he had
the courage to say, no more.
We need that same thing now, but with the rest of the command line. We need courageous software utility designers to set the bar very high with design policies that dictate, “There will be nothing in our interface that could not be spoken into a Slack bot.”
Engineers gave us HTML, a complete disaster. Writers gave us Markdown in response. We need more tech people with writer-mentality creating software that caters to everyone, not just those who can memorize which fucking dash option is needed.
#coding #developers #design #cli #terminal #tips #linux #secops