"Many of the usability issues raised by Don Norman in his 1981 criticism of Unix have gone largely unaddressed"
That's because Don's complaints were not about intrinsic issues, but complaints from someone who had a frustrating time developing a mental model of the components of a system and who tried to use the just-so story of "cognitive design" to justify his inability. The non-point about prompting y/n to delete is particularly misguided.
Similar to this article.
"ls" is called "ls", not because of slow 80-char terminals, but because humans are, on average, not fast typists. One wants to list the contents of a directory a lot, and "ls" is quicker than "catalog". Similarly, "ps" vs "tasklist" and "cc" vs "compile-a-c-program" :-). Notably, in powershell, most people have aliases that do this for powershell's necessarily verbose query functions.
It's primarily a command shell for controlling the machine, not a programming language. And the UI choices made over the last 30 years reflect that.
That fact that ls takes arguments is a UI improvement that keeps you from having to write tiny programs all the time and pipe it's output to sort and awk all day long. It is also why the "one job well" crew is only half right, and why Powershell kind of feels awkward even though it seems to get more things "correct" in that regard.
This is just yet another just-so story by someone who wants ideological purity in UI, which is completely misguided when UI, by definition is oriented towards a universe which is not ideologically pure.
That's because Don's complaints were not about intrinsic issues, but complaints from someone who had a frustrating time developing a mental model of the components of a system and who tried to use the just-so story of "cognitive design" to justify his inability. The non-point about prompting y/n to delete is particularly misguided.
Similar to this article.
"ls" is called "ls", not because of slow 80-char terminals, but because humans are, on average, not fast typists. One wants to list the contents of a directory a lot, and "ls" is quicker than "catalog". Similarly, "ps" vs "tasklist" and "cc" vs "compile-a-c-program" :-). Notably, in powershell, most people have aliases that do this for powershell's necessarily verbose query functions.
It's primarily a command shell for controlling the machine, not a programming language. And the UI choices made over the last 30 years reflect that.
That fact that ls takes arguments is a UI improvement that keeps you from having to write tiny programs all the time and pipe it's output to sort and awk all day long. It is also why the "one job well" crew is only half right, and why Powershell kind of feels awkward even though it seems to get more things "correct" in that regard.
This is just yet another just-so story by someone who wants ideological purity in UI, which is completely misguided when UI, by definition is oriented towards a universe which is not ideologically pure.