Command Line Life Partner Wanted 503
emj writes "Craiglist offers an interesting approach to finding a life partner , summmary: "There is a sad truth to the world today. I am part of a dying breed of people known as "shell users." ... Because there are fewer and fewer of us, I must help keep our lineage alive. I am looking for someone to help me do this. I need a woman (obviously) who is willing to raise a child with me in the method of Unix."."
"dying breed"? (Score:5, Insightful)
Craiglist offers an interesting approach (Score:1, Insightful)
his kids will tame him or suffer (Score:5, Insightful)
Most people aren't command line geeks because they have no desire for that. If this person has kids and empowers them then they might become anything, but if this idea of spawning a kind of clone persists then the kids are likely to be constrained, unhappy, and ultimately failures at life.
The most Ironic thing (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Don't live in the dark ages! (Score:3, Insightful)
Windows 2008 server core is not modern enough for you then? It is run from DOS(actually powershell) commandline.
reminds me of this (Score:5, Insightful)
Reminds me of this old column by Joab Jackson [citypaper.com]:
Re:Obvious Fake (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't know if I'm just not in the truly geeky end of the spectrum, but certainly in the area of "professional geeks" (developers, sysadmins, network admins etc.) I know very few who are single, and most of the ones who are don't have much trouble finding women, they just can't really be bothered with the dating game.
There was once a time when geeks were kinda freaky people you'd steer clear of, but that seems to have changed as more people get computers and an Internet connection, and start to find out that we were right about it being useful all along. Sure, it's still almost impossible to explain the job of a software developer to the average computer user, but then I can't comprehend what a professional accountant must do all day.
Re:"dying breed"? (Score:3, Insightful)
I can't imagine using *nix without sh or bash. I still prefer CLI apps as well. I use SLRN for my newsreader, because I find it faster, more streamlined and sensible.
I don't think I'm right or wrong. It's the way I do it. I've seen guys that can use the GUI like a finely-tuned instrument, so all the power to them.
Re:"dying breed"? (Score:3, Insightful)
The real question is: Who wants to deal with vast amounts of UI library, tons of little form files, and intricate event models for managing all of the user state?
It's the 20% of the app taking 80% of the time, in addition to making all of that sweet logic you wrote kinda hard to use on multiple platforms.
UI stuff, while certainly important, can be some of the least fun parts of a project to work on. What's worse? Printing?
Re:"dying breed"? (Score:5, Insightful)
Probably someone who was tired of the computational expense of having something run halfway through umpteen times, only to have their users kill the program, because it was "hung". If you've got a progress bar that's consuming enough CPU that it is having an significantly adverse impact on an application's performance, it's either coded horribly wrong, or you're at the very limit of your hardware's maximum capability, and perhaps you should really consider upgrading.
FWIW, I'm a dyed-in-the-wool shell scripting, C, Python and Perl programming command-line Unix elitist snob who uses X11 (or OS X for that matter) as little more than a fancy terminal manager, and have been for almost 20 years. But that doesn't mean I don't understand basic human factors.
I can't help you with Vista, I'm apparently lucky to never have used it. XP is more than adequate for my current Windows needs.
Re:"dying breed"? (Score:4, Insightful)
GUIs are for two things and two things only:
1. A container for multiple shell windows (slrn, irssi, mutt, etc..)
2. Using firefox to look at pictures of pretty women-type people.
Re:How this could end up... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:"dying breed"? (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not saying that CLI is going to fade away, because IMO it still has lots of advantages, just saying that only unix geeks will think to use it.
I'd say that's because the CLI tools on windows aren't very good.
If I want to copy a file from one computer to another, it's a million times easier to use scp than it is to open up a GUI tool, drag the files around, etc. Same thing for changing file ownership of an entire directory.
Creating a user on the other hand is a lot easier using a GUI. I don't want to have to remember obscure, seldom used commands to assign the right groups, etc.
The mistake people seem to make is that it's an either/or choice. Shell or GUI? No, shell AND GUI.
Not the stupidest way to find a spouse (Score:4, Insightful)
A specialty like unix cli usage really isn't the worst measurement for finding a partner for life. It definitely holds more water that looks or brand of car.
Re:"dying breed"? (Score:1, Insightful)
Wow, that's some mighty fine B.S. you've got there. How do you deal with the smell?
Let's be serious; there isn't anyting special about a command line and refering to GUI based tools as being akin to cavement grunting and pointing is pretty darn retarded.
Even if that beast is running virtual machines to support a certain toy OS that can't scale worth a damn so you can get your toy GUI development environment up and running, there's no way you get a usable GUI through an SSH tunnel over a flaky wireless connection.
Re:his kids will tame him or suffer (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:"dying breed"? (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe YOU don't do any graphic design, video editing, audio production, etc; maybe all YOUR computer use is text-based stuff; I don't see how you can extrapolate that to a blanket statement of fact for the entire world.
Unless you know any graphic designers who use command line photoshop? > photoshop -select 50,101,40,50 -addtextlayer font:helvetica size:17pt antialiasing:crisp text:"Hello" -addlayerstyle styletype:bevel Much better. Right?
Or how about, say, ATC systems? I'm sure it's really easy to spot, at a glance, two planes getting too close for comfort when you're given an 80x25 screen full of numbers, as compared to a graphical representation.
Er... no... doesn't really work, does it. So your +4 insightful is... well... not.
Re:"dying breed"? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:"dying breed"? (Score:1, Insightful)
I wish people would stop repeating that crap. That is the reason software is bloated and slow. Nobody seems to realize that while they're waiting for hardware to make their code not suck, every other developer is doing the same thing.