From: "M. Edward (Ed) Borasky" <znmeb@...>
Date: 2007-07-19T23:19:23+09:00
Subject: Re: [OT] Re: Religion (was: god 0.1.0 released)

Chad Perrin wrote:
John W. Russell: "People point. Sometimes that's just easier. They also
use words. Sometimes that's just easier. For the same reasons that
pointing has not made words obsolete, there will always be command lines."

Well ... DOS almost killed the command line out of sheer stupidity. It
took the worst parts of CP-M and reimplemented badly a couple of nice
features of the Unix shell on top of that. CP-M in turn was a bad
re-implementation of some of the rather nice command lines of PDP-11s,
such as RT-11.

My favorite command line story: years ago, I was a systems programmer at
a large NASA facility in the suburbs of Washington, DC. I was
demonstrating a CRT driver I had written for a Xerox Sigma 9, and the
people looking over my shoulder were mostly IBM mainframe programmers.
At one point, I opened up the text editor and said, "I have to edit a
JCL file." One of the observers said, "That's JCL? I can actually *read*
it!"