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Microsoft causes learned helplessness
(lemmy.sdf.org)
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this post was submitted on 05 Oct 2023
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“Guessing commands” isn’t the way to go about it. Read the man pages. Read the help for commands. Read a tutorial or some examples.
That’s exactly my point. You can’t explore a CLI. You need to rely on external resource to first learn how to use it. That’s just not something you can ask of people who want to use computers as tools. When’s the last time you read your car manual?
Info pages, help and manuals are built into the system and commands. You don't have to leave the shell to read anything. I've also explored it just by pressing a letter or two and then autocomplete. But you realize that average people need help to figure out a GUI too, right?
A car manual is more comparable to learning how to drive in the first place. And yes, sometimes I've consulted the manual to figure out what lights mean or how controls work.
Sure you can explore a CLI. It's not unlike playing Zork. You can try something, read the response, and try something else. That's how I learned the CLI outside of specific command attributes
that's just extra friction, with UIs you can explore and figure out at a glance roughly what a button will do
That greatly depends on the button's label
It's possible to do amazing things with a CLI in seconds that would be minutes of clicking with a GUI - that's why they still exist. And sure, it's tuned towards people who would be "how about I write a Python program to handle this".