Slashdot submission:

[garote]

Re: In The Beginning Was The Command Line

Unqualified code-monkey Garote submits his annotated version of Neal Stephenson's "In The Beginning Was The Command Line", updated to discuss UI design theory and fill in some of the gaps from the last five years. (And yes, he has been granted permission from Neal to do this.) There's plenty more to cover of course: Will the command-line last only as long as the keyboard? How will desktop search technology change our workflow? What about the 3D interface? Scroll to any random paragraph in the essay and you'll find something worth expounding on. What's ahead for the next five years?

Comments

[sherrila.livejournal.com]

Yay s00per fish! :)

[thegoodreverend.livejournal.com]

Congrats on getting this posted! Always a treat to read your stuff when linked from a major website =)

[garote]

Thanks. It's quite exciting, yes - though I'm beginning to wonder why I subjected myself to it so readily, because a lot of the commentary is about how much my writing sucks. It's a bit discouraging.

[thegoodreverend.livejournal.com]

That's par for the course on slashdot. When I submitted a story that got accepted, I was blasted a few times just for my writeup (it wasn't even something I'd written).

Most of the comments there are positive and about the larger issues. There's always going to be people who just take shots and the non-issue issues. Do your best to ignroe them.

Interesting

[djdrue.livejournal.com]

Last night I printed up your annotated essay (all 60 some pages!) took it home and read it.

While I found that some of the essay detracted from the more technical aspects. I thought that your input was well placed, and I found the entire piece very thought provoking.

I'll be bringing in a used computer into my house shortly for the purposes of having a development machine, and this essay has convinced be to try a debian distrubution of linux installation.

Thanks.

Metaphor Shear

[cruxdestruct.livejournal.com]

Stephenson spends quite a lot of energy underlining the dangers of 'Metaphor Shear', and you do a pretty good job of making him look just a tad hysterical. I think it is a very good thing to consider, however, for the reason that many, many people - hackers and lusers (as the dichotomy goes) alike - very, very often have deep trouble with the interfaces of their computers. Quite a lot of the time, the machines do not act in the way the user expects, and while this can sometimes be chalked up to user idiocy, there are still a lot of cases where it needs to be addressed.

I think, however, that the lesson of this problem, and where you make more sense than Stephenson, is not that metaphors are bad and we should all work as close to the actual bytes as we can (I say this even as a diehard vim zealot), but instead that metaphors are really hard to do well. Interface design is hard, and frankly is a bit behind where it should be. I think there are a lot of things about modern operating system interfaces which are ass-backwards, but unfortunately that's just because the tasks demand better design, not because the notion of a GUI is an inherent scam.

I apologize for offering my unsolicited comments. Nevertheless, I appreciated your additions.

Re: Metaphor Shear

[garote]

Exactly. You have just condensed 80% of Neal's essay, and my annotations, down to two paragraphs.

Thanks for reading, and for the commentary!