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Users of Photoshop or InDesign or Illustrator or Maya or Logic or Premiere Pro most definitly do express themselves

But in those programmes, the GUI is more like a keyboard of a CLI than the actual programme. The GUI controls are used as tools to use on the main area, the drawing area. A graphical programme like photoshop presents you with a massive empty whitespace for you to draw in. It doesn't tell you where to draw, or what colour to draw. It allows you choose any colour you want. Once you paint some red, you can then paint any other colour.

In this way the programmes you list confirm the "unbounded, "lack of constrains" and "newbie unfriendlyness" of the CLI.

A newbie doesn't know what commands to type into bash, and they don't know what colours to put down first in photoshop.



So a sufficiently complex GUI is more like a CLI? When is a GUI complex enough to be "more like a keyboard of a CLI"?

I'm sorry but the basic premise of GUIs being limited and CLIs not is just completely wrong.


I don’t understand. You also seem to think that the author picked a horrible analogy?


No, I think the analogy is apt. I think you're looking too shallowly and only looking at GUI/CLI, and thinking that Photoshop, being a GUI, fits into that world. Whereas Photoshop has more in common with CLI tools than many GUI programmes.


Wow. Just wow. What a completely absurd redefinition of what is a CLI and what is a GUI. No true Scotsman, anyone?

It is just not an apt analogy if it requires you to claim that Photoshop is more CLI than GUI. That’s so freaking absurd.

Well, I guess I should have picked up on that when reading your last paragraph where you imply that everything that’s hard to use is also a CLI.


Have you ever seen a professional autocad user? How would you define that? A blurred line between the terms CLI and GUI is not a True Scottsman. It's an observable reality.


I'll attest to that.

Long ago I used Autocad regularly for work. When someone gets really productive with it they tend to use one hand on the keyboard for selecting menu items and typing short CLI commands and the other for picking points and dragging selection boxes.

That kind of interface really does attempt to combine the best of both worlds, but at the expense of a big learning curve.


I’m quite confused. Everyone seems to disagree with me by vehemently agreeing with me. As you yourself say: Expression is not reserved for CLIs. GUIs can allow for it, too.

I’m not trying to bring down CLIs here. What I don’t like, though, is how the author of the article tries to bring down GUIs to prop up CLIs. That’s just not necessary. GUIs are used by so many people to express themselves and it’s patently absurd to claim otherwise.


Basically I am disagreeing with the validity of the discussion in general. There aren't agreed upon meanings for either term, so there isn't much point in going forward.




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