Comment by Bjorkbat
2 years ago
I really wouldn’t call GUIs a “command-based paradigm”. Feels much more like they’re digital analogues of tools and objects. Your mouse is a tool, and you use it to interface with objects and things, and through special software it can become a more specialized tool (word processors, spreadsheets, graphic design software, etc). You aren’t issuing commands, you’re manipulating a digital environment with tools.
Which is why the notion of conversational AI (or whatever dumb name they came up with for the “third paradigm”) seems kind of alien to me. I mean, I definitely see its utility, but I find it hard to imagine it being as dominant as some are arguing it could be. Any task that involves browsing for information seems like more of an object manipulation task. Any task involving some kind of visual design seems like a tool manipulation task, unless you aren’t too picky about the final result.
Ultimately I think conversational UI is best suited not for tasks, but services. Granted, the line between the two can be fuzzy at times. If you’re looking for a website, but you don’t personally know anything about making a website, then that task morphs into a service that someone or something else does.
Which I suppose is kind of the other reason why I find the idea kind of alien. I almost never use the computer for services. I use it to browse, to create, to work, all of which entail something more intuitively suited to object or tool manipulation.
AutoCAD and Rhino 3D are two examples that I remember having a command prompt sitting proudly somewhere at the bottom of the UI. Your mouse clicks and keyboard shortcuts were all converted into commands in text form. If you look at your command history, it's a script - a bit boring since it is completely linear, but add loops, conditionals and function/macro support and you get a very capable scripting environment.
AutoCAD definitely was CLI-based, with menus and dialogs basically filling in parameters to the commands. But in the late 90s or so Autodesk got religion and decided that AutoCAD should be a Windows product and follow Microsoft UI guidelines, so I don't know how well they stuck with the "command line underneath" over the years.
Early in AutoCAD's history, Autodesk did add loops and conditionals to its CLI -- with Lisp! Type an open paren and the command line became a REPL. You could define new commands, directly manipulate entity data structures, and have all the control structures Lisp affords -- not Common Lisp, it was way simpler, but it was powerful.
To this day, wayward mech engineers still sometimes ask Autolisp-related questions on unrelated Lisp fora, such as r/lisp.
I was just trying to address the parent and others' doubt that a graphical user interface can be thought of as a command-based paradigm, seen in these threads:
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36395727
The designers behind the examples mentioned wanted to expose and capitalize on the connection between traditional "type command" CLI and "press button, drag rectangle" GUI workflows.