You may do better, but that's not the point. Their success rate was an underwhelming 27%. Can you figure out what each of these icons does? The icons that Microsoft Word puts in its standard toolbar are a great example of graphics being used as a poor replacement for words. Words can capture abstractions that pictures cannot. Pictionary is a game where you try to represent objects, places, and abstract thoughts in pictorial form. Language has an immense amount of descriptive power. In the run to abandon command line interfaces for the GUI, we've left behind the versatility of language. Perhaps, command lines are staged for a comeback.]]> If commands were memorable and their syntax forgiving, perhaps the command line wouldn't be going the way of the punch card. I still have to ask my co-workers what flags are needed for untaring a gzipped file. And even if I do remember the command name, remembering its options is like bobbing for apples in a cement mixer. The hard part of learning Unix is memorizing command names as unfathomable as Stonehenge's origin. Maybe it's just the command lines we're used to. I don't know if I can set up a printer on the command line, but I do know that I don't want to try.īut maybe that isn't the fault of command line interfaces in general. The GUI dealt the first blow, and now the Web has nailed to coffin on the old style text interface, and it seems to have been a boon for the user. Let's face it, command line interfaces are extinct to the masses. Command line interfaces are bell-bottom out-of-fashion in the current Web 2.0 boom: I have yet to see an Ajax-enabled glass-reflected command prompt.
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