Topics: Interesting Tech, Computing, Interfaces, Education

Fellow Linux Users Group in Princeton (LUGip) member David Harding had a good posting on The Command Line is Dead; Long Live The Command Line on his blog. The posting was a thoughtful response to a suggestion somebody made about teaching GNU/Linux newcomers how to administer their systems via GUI (graphical user interface) programs.

He makes several excellent points, especially the "three mistakes we make teaching newbies systems administration via GUIs instead of command line. The the third "mistake" is particularly interesting because it is a socal rather than a technical issue.

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3. We communicate with new users in a different language than we speak among ourselves. We therefore exclude them from our discourse about the complex and the innovative. We, effectively, encourage them to be second class citizens.
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Spot on! Some might say, "Why not speak in the 'simpler' GUI terms?" But those "simpler GUI terms" are really nowhere as simpler as they might seem. Also they don't translate that well across versions, distros, or platforms.

By the way, as I am dealing with several blind people, I also find the GUI references tend to lock out visually impaired people whereas the command line approaches are more accessible and understandable. (Yes, there are some adaptive programs for GUI environments such as JAWS for blind people. But they are nowhere as simple as the screen-to-speech output approaches for command line environs. Command-line is also quite Braille-friendly. If you are interested in GNU/Linux for Blind people, see the Blinux project.)