Simon Willison’s Weblog

Do people still write and compile programs from the command line, instead of an IDE? Why or why not?

22nd January 2012

My answer to Do people still write and compile programs from the command line, instead of an IDE? Why or why not? on Quora

Being an expert with command line tools gives you super powers.

The beauty of command line interfaces is that anything you can do, you can automate. GUI tools have to go out of their way to enable task automation, and chances are it will be very difficult to automate anything that the tool author did not anticipate.

Programmers should look to automate anything that they do more than twice.