[Info-vax] Suggested DCL enhancement

[Craig A. Berry]

On 11/10/20 11:26 AM, Stephen Hoffman wrote:
> On 2020-11-10 13:45:09 +0000, John E. Malmberg said:
> 
>> On 11/4/2020 12:21 PM, Stephen Hoffman wrote:
>>>
>>> IDE usage and management UI usage and app user interface designs are 
>>> all shifting developers and administrators and networking folks and 
>>> end-users away from the command-line, too.
>>
>> I have been doing devops on and QA automation on Linux and windows for 
>> a while now, and I can assure you that it command line is the dominant 
>> method used for actually getting stuff configured and doing functional 
>> tests.
>>
>> GUIs are find for end users at admins that have to deal with a few 
>> systems, but when a small collection of systems to manage is at least 
>> 100, anything requiring or using a GUI is PITA.   And I have been 
>> routinely dealing with much higher numbers of systems.
>> ...
>> If you are designing a system or application to be managed with a GUI 
>> instead of those methods, you are going to be hurting your market share.
> 
> What's the general trend? More command line? Or toward more automation 
> and simpler interfaces?
> 
> All of what I'm seeing is trending toward GUI, toward web-managed 
> interfaces, toward simpler, and toward automation.

The general trend for server management, devops, and, to a lesser extent
even development is definitely away from the GUI and back to the command
line.  Witness, for example, Microsoft Server Core,[1] which is Windows
Server with no "Desktop Experience," or, in other words, Windows with no
windows.

The whole devops movement is based on the premise that automating
operations is just another kind of code to write and developers already
know how to do that.  That code consists of commands written in various
CLIs.

Development tools and frameworks increasingly promote and even rely on
commands typed in terminal or PowerShell windows integrated into the
IDE, though code editing is still generally done in a GUI editor.

I find all this ironic after a few decades of trying to convince junior
developers to use the command line and generally being greeted with
terror and confusion.  But the command line is definitely back.


[1] 
<https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/administration/server-core/what-is-server-core>