Real programmers use the right tool for the job

I was doing some light reading via Slashdot on why guis suck revisited. Reading the endless debate about graphical interfaces versus command line is like a political debate. Authors often frame the article to one spectrum end or another to entice response.

The myriad of examples back up a specific view point I’m going to say something totally uncontroversial: “real programmers use the right tool for the job”. This post title itself being a reference to xkcd “Real Programmers”.

Yes we all know plenty of examples where a well placed sed saved the day. We also know when popping open an application and clicking a few buttons is much easier than writing individual commands.

Really, how many people do you know who use mail or mutt as a command line interface to their mail? How many people browse the internet using links? My approach to any problem is to find the right tool to accomplish the task. Sometimes this means going straight to the command line, other times it means interacting with a program via a graphical interface.

Real programmers have an arsenal of tools to get the job done and can identify the best way out of a problem.

Author’s Note

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Original Wordpress categories: [‘Personal Musings’]

Original Wordpress tags: “Personal Musings”, “cli”, “command line”, “gui”

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tags: 2011, wordpress, txcowboycoder, musings, cli, command-line, gui, xkcd

May 6th, 2024 Converted to jekyll markdown format and copied to personal site
May 24th, 2011 Originally published on txcowboycoder wordpress site