The designer of a program that provides a graphical user interface must
anticipate all the possible ways in which the user will interact with the
program and provide ways to trigger the appropriate program responses by means
of pointing and clicking. Consequently, the user is constrained to working
only in predicted ways. The user is therefore unable to adapt the graphical
user interface program to accommodate unforeseen tasks and circumstances. In a
nutshell, that's why many system administration tasks are performed using the
shell: system administrators, in fulfilling their responsibility to keep a
system up and running, must continually deal with and overcome the unforeseen.
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/debian/chapter/ch13_01.html
Back in the days of the command-line interface, users were all Morlocks
who had to convert their thoughts into alphanumeric symbols and type them in,
a grindingly tedious process that stripped away all ambiguity, laid bare all
hidden assumptions, and cruelly punished laziness and imprecision. Then the
interface-makers went to work on their GUIs, and introduced a new semiotic
layer between people and machines. People who use such systems have abdicated
the responsibility, and surrendered the power, of sending bits directly to the
chip that's doing the arithmetic, and handed that responsibility and power
over to the OS. This is tempting because giving clear instructions, to anyone
or anything, is difficult. We cannot do it without thinking, and depending on
the complexity of the situation, we may have to think hard about abstract
things, and consider any number of ramifications, in order to do a good job of
it. For most of us, this is hard work. We want things to be easier. How badly
we want it can be measured by the size of Bill Gates's fortune. [...]
In other words, the first thing that Apple's hackers had done when
they'd got the MacOS up and running--probably even before they'd gotten it up
and running--was to re-create the Unix interface, so that they would be able
to get some useful work done. At the time, I simply couldn't get my mind
around this, but: as far as Apple's hackers were concerned, the Mac's vaunted
Graphical User Interface was an impediment, something to be circumvented
before the little toaster even came out onto the market.
http://www-classic.be.com/users/cryptonomicon/
Mastery of UNIX, like mastery of language, offers real freedom. The
price of freedom is always dear, but there's no substitute. Personally, I'd
rather pay for my freedom than live in a bitmapped, pop-up-happy dungeon like
NT. I'm hoping that as IT folks become more seasoned and less impressed by
superficial convenience at the expense of real freedom, they will yearn for
the kind of freedom and responsibility UNIX allows. When they do, UNIX will be
there to fill the need. - Thomas Scoville, The Elements
of Unix Style: Unix as Literature