Original construction is here . You must read that first to understand this. With the limitations of assumptions, I go to extremes to test the theory. It's a practice used in physics a lot to know how robust a theory is.
Command line is more efficient over any kind menu clicking system.
At each step, the buttons are limited but command line is almost infinite. An assumption here made is that we are infinitely intelligent which is not the case. But I believe we are more smart than the 10 buttons and menus shown on the surface. And the more advanced you are, the higher your efficiency. Not to mention the practical case when you use one liners, you are not only tens and hundreds times more efficient. Even just starting a few softwares etc. When you have command line and you know all the commands, you are theoretically more efficient. (Even if you build some sort of "super button". You won't win because we can at the same time build "super commands" . )
I think this is somehow due to the internal command driven design of the computer.
But I'm not discarding new technology. How computer and human interact can be changed and we may have some "infinite" choices possibilities at each stage too. We really only need "a very large number" because human brain is finite anyway. But we are better than the at most 100 buttons you can see on the screen because as you've experienced, we can definitely pick the right thing out of 1000, 10000 ... Like a command. That's why we're above computers because each time, I think we can deal with two signals, we are multi-functional and multi-choice-making.
I'm not here to slaughter GUI however. It is a step forward even though not in the efficiency kind of sense. The efficiency calculation is based on the fact that you know the interface. For a starter, it is of course the GUI that is at all usable. It's kind of like a car. F1 cars uses stick because it is more efficient, but a daily car uses automatic which makes it, at the bottom line, operable to common people.
BTW, scientific philosophy holds that a theory is only good if it give intelligent corollaries or explains to anti-intuitive things in a reasonable way. To the contrary, a theory's limitations are shown or is completely overthrown because of the absurdity in its conclusions. I won't cite the classic story of Galileo's reasoning on Aristotle's theory of a heavier body falls faster, but it is a great example.
I haven't been able to draw many interesting conclusions but I hope some of you guys can inspire me.
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