Being a relative noob at this CLI thingy, reminds me a lot about an old favourite that was probably ‘THE’ main game from as far back as near the year dot, i’m talking about ‘Zork’. Having recently obtained an original mainframe version, i was instantly transported back to ‘Standing outside a house’, and fondly recalled how amazing the level of interaction the CLI provided.
Stuff like…‘Fill bottle with water and place bottle in sack’. Now, how much easier might the Linux CLI be if the same level of interaction was provided.
Would it be easier, more fun, and more intuative to the noob, if the instructions were more ‘Zork’ language than what looks like cryptic now?
Is the CLI instruction set still in it’s present form because that’s the way it’s always been? Was it created in what can be described as shorthand because of memory constraints?
If it was purely due to memory usage is it possible to make it more verbose (Hmmm, lovely Zork word).
Commands like ls, rm and other very short and cryptic ones are from the old Unix days. In those times we had Teletypes (TTY) and hammering on them was real work. So the makers of Unix tried to avoid as much typing as possible.
Also output should be minimised in those days. Did you ever wait for a line of ouput at 1200 BPS?
Ther is of course a nice task for you ahead: creating aliases for all those shortys in bash in your /home/<yourusername>/.alias, like
alias list-what-you-know-about=ls
I must warn that this is an unciommon behaviour. Most users still try to minimise using aliases:
On Wed, 2009-04-22 at 18:16 +0000, saiyuki wrote:
…
> Stuff like…‘Fill bottle with water and place bottle in sack’. Now,
> how much easier might the Linux CLI be if the same level of interaction
> was provided.
>
> Would it be easier, more fun, and more intuative to the noob, if the
> instructions were more ‘Zork’ language than what looks like cryptic
> now?
You mean instead of:
$ rm ouch
rm: cannot remove ouch': Is a directory $ rmdir ouch rmdir: failed to remove ouch’: Directory not empty
$ rm -rf ouch
You want something more like:
Zork> Remove directory
The directory cannot be removed that way.
Zork> Remove directory please
The request is considered, but the directory still remains.
Zork> Remove directory and all of its contents please
The directory has been removed. Thank you for being polite.
From my own experiance ‘rm’ was not the word i first looked for as a command. Honestly i looked for the word ‘remove’, which was the same as the old ‘Basic’ language usage.
Linux has grown and become more updated in line with modern usage, is it not time for the CLI to be also updated.
How much of a problem is it to expand the commands to be more verbose, or will it forever be and old method of communication with the system.
So make aliases, symbolic links, write a new shell (based on basic when you like so, but do not expect many people to like that one). It is all up to you to make the new more talkative, more human resources eating shell
> hendersj;1976319 Wrote:
>> On Wed, 22 Apr 2009 19:56:01 +0000, hcvv wrote:
>>
>> > Did you ever wait for a
>> > line of ouput at 1200 BPS?
>>
>> Or indeed 110 over a teletype.
>>
>> Jim
> Yes, you are correct. I forgot how slow it was.
>
> Chompe chompe chompe chompe chompe chompe … klong! tsaaaak
>
> Walk off doing something else during the endless waiting. Coming back
> … run out op paper! rotfl!
I can remember my dad bringing home a TTY with an acoustic coupler, I
think 110 would’ve been considered fast. My older half-brother works for
3M and I remember thinking that the terminal he had at home was a step up
(well, let’s face it, it was).
I haven’t thought about that old equipment in a long, long time.
I remember that 2400 BPS is already quite adequate to use as with a VT terminal (emulator in MS/DOS 6). For nightly support from home I used that until say 5 years ago. You do not need very much more when you support Unix systems from the CLI.
> I remember that 2400 BPS is already quite adequate to use as with a VT
> terminal (emulator in MS/DOS 6). For nightly support from home I used
> that until say 5 years ago. You do not need very much more when you
> support Unix systems from the CLI.
Very very true. I can remember using 300 and 1200 baud modems to connect
to CompuServe and other BBSes - with a text-only interface, that was more
than fast enough until you started downloading files and paying by the
minute.
