We haven’t had one of these text-vs.-visual kind of debates in a while, and I think we’re long overdue. This is a great piece of writing that looks at why UNIX in particular is so deeply rooted in text — and it puts forward a surprisingly untechnical theory (yes, of course, the UNIX pipe / composition argument makes an appearance too): http://theody.net/elements.html

I'm pretty triggered that you tried to make this into a flame war because text is obviously superior 😉

"I continued to be puzzled at why they resented typing." I think the author is reading too much into this lol. the UX is just bad so people dont bother. nothing more complicated than that.

The biggest issue with "text vs visual" arguments seems to be that there aren't enough examples of killer language-oriented programming environments. I believe the work which @ibdknox has shared recently, with Eve, and with Light Table are largely textual oriented at the low level, but leverage spacial design to organize at a higher level (similar to Darklang, which is textual at a lower level and spacial at the "wiring" level) Different programming environments place the boundary between text and visual at different levels.

yes exactly. it doesnt have to be a choice between the two. all terminal UIs ive seen anyway try to poorly replicate more visual features from real GUIs. Not to even mention how the visual UIs we have are severely handicapped and dont even try to give you the same power as text does. maybe they could however?

Independent of text vs visual, the possibility that the world chose WIMP because people consider typing difficult/elitist is an indictment of our global society. If the future of programming is visual, I hope it's not because we're an idiocracy.

Off topic I suppose, but a thought prompted by this thread: is there such a thing as a Slack-like chat service but where rather than text-based, exchanges are sketch and doodle based? I can imagine such a thing combined with a tablet+pen.

@Kartik Agaram It's probably because we're a lazy-ocracy more than an idiocracy, which tbh is a good hing.

text is visual. check mate

That was a charming article. It's nice to read someone effusing about a beloved tool from a bygone era. I'm too young (and hot, and tasteful) to have lived through the era myself, but I absolutely recognize the superiority of UNIX when compared to NT, as a lifelong Mac user. I did bristle at "GUI-laden Macintosh", though. That felt unfair to me. The Mac I type this on is thin and light. Whatever weight is added due to the presence of the GUI is hardly noticeable. Surely, the glass in my laptop's trackpad weighs less than the full-travel clicky keyboard and CRT required by your portable UNIX terminal of choice. Let's all bear in mind that what is being compared here is text vs visual in the context of operating systems, not in the context of programming, which are not the same thing at all. That said, I'm going to talk about programming, because that's an argument I can win. If there was any flaw with the original Macintosh (which there wasn't, but just go with me here) it's that the only visual programming environment for it was released 3 years late. And even then, that environment wasn't truly "_visual_ programming", as the included art tools were entirely separate from the programming tools. At best, you could call it "hypermedia programming", as you had to work very quickly to be able to do the job of both an artist and a programmer. And there we see the true advantage of visual programming — by programming entirely with one's art skill, you do not need to waste time developing full thoughts, as you do with writing. With a simple sketch, you can reconfigure your web browser to... do other things. Wow, writing is tedious. Here, let me finish the thought more appropriately: ✂︎⚗︎︎🃍▼. Simple! But rather than concerning ourselves with the worst instances, let us compare only the best. We've seen a text operating system created by thoughtful writers (UNIX), and a visual operating system created by thoughtful artists (Macintosh). We've seen a text programming system created by thoughtful writers (Tcl). We truly have not yet seen a visual programming system created by thoughtful artists. So nobody is allowed to say visual programming is worse than textual programming, because as I've just proven — in your domain, using words (bleh) — visual programming doesn't exist yet.

🧑‍🚒👨‍🚒👩‍🚒 Ready! Hmm, the sweet smell of 1998. Honest question friends: why don't we take the advantages of both? GUIs what with their menus and clicks which made it it relatively easy to find out what you could do in an interface at least historically — less true now with hidden menus, mouseovers, etc. But add to that the transcript of recorded commands, composable, and scriptable? Or alternatively start with the command line, add a more modern iteration of ACME, then add some of the exploitability of showing what commands make sense in context, what options might be relevant, and what objects might handy? Now we can debate these two, better options! 🔥

Most coders do though. Very few people run a CLI only OS and apps, and most coders interact with the CLI

Honest question friends: why don't we take the advantages of both?

Maybe this article tries to go that way: "CLUI: Building a Graphical Command Line" (via @Sumowski from another thread).

nice article @ogadaki tbh that is just a dropdown with optional text input if you think about it

@Tyler Adams Can you elaborate on the stupid vs lazy thing? I realize I have some hazy opinions on it, but they're likely different from yours. IMO there are two kinds of laziness, and I often think of them as physical vs mental laziness. I tend to think of physical laziness as often a good thing, but mental laziness as always a bad thing. But now that I think about it, I realize the two categories are both applicable to physical and mental work. So I'm not sure what to call them.

Yeah, I was thinking that people prefer guis because they require less effort to learn and work NOW, not because the user thinks they're functionally better. As a topic laziness seems to be ridiculously complicated. Is it the ultimate bad? The ultimate good? I can't tell. larry wall touches on the programmer virtue of laziness http://threevirtues.com/ Farnam street touches on laziness as a leadership virtues https://fs.blog/2013/09/why-clever-and-lazy-people-make-great-leaders/ Ribbonfarm touches on it everything Venkatesh writes, and in particular, in this series https://www.ribbonfarm.com/series/mediocratopia-2/

I love the thorough linkage! My two-sentence rebuttal: at some point a society running a greedy algorithm at scale is liable to hit an evolutionary dead end. We rely on people choosing to thoughtfully learn new things sometimes. So from that perspective this doesn't seem much better than idiocracy. And so we don't have to split hairs on what to call it 🙂

Actually greedy at scale with enough randomness works really really well, life's been doing it for 1 Billion years 🙂

Thanks @Tyler Adams for the links! I really enjoyed the Mediocratopia article series. It is all about purpose of your actions, and the energy you spend, and the fat you store. One excerpt I like from the ensō article: "You draw a circle with a single brush stroke, with no corrections or do-overs, and it doesn’t really matter if you complete the circle. You can make another_ _ensō if you like, or just go have a beer instead."