[Info-vax] Suggested DCL enhancement

[Arne Vajhøj]

On 11/10/2020 2:58 PM, Stephen Hoffman wrote:
> On 2020-11-10 18:42:50 +0000, Craig A. Berry said:
>> 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:
>>>> ...
>>>> 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.
> 
> I am exceedingly skeptical that command line interaction is the future. 
> As a stopgap, yes.
> 
> I'm seeing an approach similar to FILEVIEW on OpenVMS DECwindows, or a 
> web GUI for various hosting providers, where somebody scripts something, 
> and then that script is callable from or triggered by a controller app 
> or by a user at a remote GUI.
Traditional GUI where the actual actions are done once on the GUI
are not an option today due to the time waste and the lack of
repeatability.

Interactive (non-script) CLI has the same problems.

What is needed today is scripts and a CLI that can
execute them.

Whether the language is bash or perl or python or
something proprietary is less important.

And whether the scripts are sftp'ed up and executed in a ssh
session or run from a fancy GUI where one pick the script
and the target is also less important.

The server does not need a GUI - it only needs a CLI to
execute the scripts.

The work computer of the guy writing the scripts may
benefit from various GUI tools.

Arne