Obviously this is not my proposition but Moglen's. I have included it because a) I whole-heartedly agree with him, and b) never have I seen such an eloquent, succinct, and poignant criticism of what I like to call user-centred fascism. And I don't use the term lightly. Among some circles, the command line interface (CLI) is seen a heresy that should be banished from human-computer interaction, to be replaced with much "simpler, friendly, natural" point-and-grunt interfaces.

Before I proceed let's get one point straight. There are some tasks where point-and-click is appropriate. Editing an image is the most obvious example, but I would also include web-browsing in that category. That is not in question. What I find most damaging in the user-centred view of HCI is the idea that all interaction should be reduced to a form that the "H" (Human) side will find simple, friendly, and natural. The problem is that many tasks are so inherently complex that there is no intuitive way of performing them; in these situations, the typical approach from user-centredistas is to "prune" the task until it meets their criteria for intuitiveness. But in doing so, many degrees of richness and efficiency in the original task are simply lost. What you have left is a castrated and much weaker means of interfacing with a computer.

Moglen uses an expression which is most revealing: "pre-linguistic". Now, learning a mother tongue is intuitive, so I will not use it as an example. Consider instead learning a second language as an adult, or even better, learning how to read and write. Think about it: there is nothing simple, natural or intuitive about writing. It takes many years of effort to master, and most people never achieve it fully. So why do we as a society bother to do it? Because long ago we have come to the conclusion that the advantages far outweight the initial investment. My point is that in an age where information rules, the societal advantages of teaching people to better interact with computers will likewise far outweight the necessary effort.

If you have no knowledge of SQL, or regular expressions, or the unix-style pipelining of basic commands such as find, grep, sed, awk, you might be wondering what is so bloody great about the CLI anyway. But if do, surely you will see the "pre-infoliteracy" period in your life as akin to the time before you learned to read or write. It is therefore quite disturbing (and what Moglen refers to "socially retrograde") that user-centredistas will champion the caveman interface as an "advance". What would you say to a person that defended the invention of the television as justification to stop teaching children how to read and write? After all, watching TV is a lot simpler, friendly, and intuitive than having to spend years learning those "elitist scribbles"...