From: mds@bogus.nodomain.nowhere   
      
   D Finnigan  writes:   
      
   > On 2/25/25 8:08 PM, Rich wrote:   
   >   
   >> The prior can also largely be blamed on modern GUI OS'es.  They've   
   >> reached the point where the unknowing can make use of a computer   
   >> without ever needing a command line at any point.   
   >   
   > Which meant that computer hardware and software vendors could thus   
   > market their wares to a much larger consumer audience.   
      
   Just so.  But doesn't address the bizarre observation that PhDs in   
   computer-related domains are utterly unaware of the command line.   
      
         The command line is like language.   
      
         The GUI is like shopping.   
      
   Reports from a very different domain (sorry, I forget the URLs) are   
   to the effect that university-level teachers of language & literature   
   find that students are wholly unprepared to read whole, long novels.   
   They just don't get it.  Somehow, despite having reached postsecondary   
   level, they don't have the attention span -- or can't call up the   
   intellectual resources to invoke the attention span -- to read   
   attentively something that goes on for a few hundred pages.   
      
   A friend and fellow blacksmith -- sadly now deceased -- was very bright   
   and very skilled but recounted an experience from high school.   
   Assigned to read a novel -- I forget but I think it was Count of Monte   
   Christo -- he just couldn't get through it.  So he bought the Coles   
   Notes (or similar) version and still ran aground.  Then he happened   
   on the comic book version, bought and read that, got a passing grade on   
   the review he had to write.   
      
   All well.  There are differing kinds of intelligence and his strength   
   lay in spatial relations and tangible physical forms, not language.   
      
   But people taking a university-level Great Books course are a   
   different matter.  So are people studying how computers operate.   
   Language is a fundamental intellectual tool.  Shopping, stichomythia,   
   ideas reduced to 168-char squibs and, yes, shopping look to me like   
   degenerate forms of disciplined thinking.   
      
   As a digression, an assignment left for the reader, consider the   
   command line, even one as intimidating as that for gcc.  After decades   
   of change, with the accretion of a multitude of options, it retains   
   the same linguistic form of a command.   
      
   But how do you get along with a GUI for something of similar   
   complexity when someone 20 or 30 or 40 years your junior, decides that   
   a complete redesign of of the GUI is a desirable and necessary   
   improvement?  He grew up in a mental Manhattan or a Mental Tokyo,   
   demolishes the graphical Boston of your favorite tool and rebuilds it   
   to match his visual head-space.   
      
   So you can learn it all over again.  Life-long learning is supposed to   
   be about learning new stuff, but about learning the same stuff over   
   and over.   
      
      
   --   
   Mike Spencer                  Nova Scotia, Canada   
      
   --- SoupGate-DOS v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)