> There are fundamental differences between GUI and CLI types 
> of interfaces. There are of course good and bad examples of 
> both, but that's another story.

On an old mini computer system years ago, I sat down at a console and, not
knowing what I was going, type "help" and pressed enter. The one word
response ("RTFM") had the desired effect.

> The main difference for me as user is that a GUI is often 
> easier to start with, and more cumbersome lateron, a CLI is 
> often the opposite.
> And a big problem for me is that most GUIs are not scriptable.

But I have done a quite a bit of scripting in MS Windows using vbscript,
sendkeys, sidekick, etc... With various degrees of success. Some authors of
applications in windows don't think keyboards are for anything other than
entering text.

And CLI scripting in Windows systems is very much alive and well, so
wouldn't it be nice to have a GUI of the command line utilities? E.g. the
standard Win32 command line stuff like SORT, DIR, etc... Should have GUI
interfaces accessible from the command line as menu pull downs or popups.

There is another issue: modular vs monolithic applications. In Windows, each
application has to do everything that one might want to do. E.g. Excel has
to have a spell checker. In Unix, all the little functional modules each do
one thing well, and you put them together to get the job done. The latter
approach does not seem to translate well to GUI operation, but what if you
have a GUI interface for ls, grep, etc... That looks like any of the
available flowchart drawing applications?

I've always loved that quote about Unix being very friendly, but very
selective about it's friends. Perl seems that way to me as well.

---
James.
 

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