bradbury@aeiveos.com (Robert J. Bradbury) wrote:
> The reason CLIs remain popular today is because it is still generally
> faster (and smaller) to code CLIs than GUIs. If I'm writing code for
And because real languages with recursive grammars are far more flexible than any combination of menus and clickboxes. Same reason programming by connecting boxes on a screen a la VB hasn't replaced general programming languages. In GUI or HTML design GUI methods may be faster, but they can't go beyond their domains.
Then there's the LaTeX attack on WYSIWYG: "Sure, your 50 page paper looks very nice, and exactly the way it'll print out. But now you want to change the way you delimit paragraphs..."
See Neal Stephenson's "In the Beginning was the Command Line", http://www.polarcom.com/~patawi/matt/glass/beginning_CLI.html and elsewhere.
-xx- Damien X-)