That philosophical point about what it even means to "tell a computer to do things" is a good one. Sure, clicking around in a GUI is also telling the computer what to do. But there's a huge difference between using someone else's abstraction and building your own from scratch. The article is about that second part - the ability to throw stuff together however you want. With a GUI, you're stuck with whatever the designer thought of. With a shell, you can build just about anything
But you’re still limited by the designer of that shell? Or userspace? Or kernel? Or cpu architecture? I mean, how deep should you go before «it’s however YOU want»?
Sure, and at some point you're limited by physics. But "limited by the universe" and "limited by what a product manager imagined in 2019" are pretty different kinds of limits
ZeroDayDreamer · · focus · HN ↗
kalx · · focus · HN ↗
ZeroDayDreamer · · focus · HN ↗