If point’n’grunt (which is an allusion to an interview with Eben Moglen) is not an accurate description, how exactly did you know to take offense? Let me give you the whole thing, although you will probably find it more objectionable than anything I’ve said.
In 1979, when I was working at IBM, I wrote an internal memo lambasting Apple’s Lisa, its first attempt to adapt Xerox PARC technology, the graphical user interface, into a desktop PC. I was then working on the development of APL2, a nested array, algorithmic, symbolic language, and was committed to the idea of making languages that were better than natural for procedural thought. The idea was to do for whole ranges of human thinking what mathematics has been doing for thousands of years in the quantitative arrangement of knowledge, and to help people think in more precise and clear ways. What I saw in the Xerox PARC technology was the caveman interface: you point and you grunt. A massive winding down, regressing away from language in order to address the technological nervousness of the user. Users wanted to be infantilized, to return to a pre-linguistic condition in the using of computers, and the Xerox PARC technology’s primary advantage was that it allowed users to address computers in a pre-linguistic way. This was to my mind a terribly socially retrograde thing to do, and I have not changed my mind about that.
I like GUIs for exactly three reasons, but I’m glad that Microsoft and Apple have stopped trying to get rid of CLIs and embraced the idea that there are richer and more complex interactions possible between machines and people than mice alone can possibly provide. The famous Apple single-button mouse only offered more creative input than “point and grunt” to graphic artists, who could draw with it. Everybody else was just selecting from a limited menu, they weren’t cooking their own dishes. Keyboards are great - the more buttons the better!
Use whatever you prefer.
