2020-01-03
So last time I made the case for why you should stop relying on your mouse pointing and clicking on things, and learn to actually speak to your computer in language. And speaking of language, I thought I should add a note on terminology:
a terminal is an endpoint. Railways and aeroplanes have terminals.
Tom Hanks spent a movie
stuck inside in one. A computer terminal is called thus not because
Tom Hanks once opened vim and has not yet worked out how to escape
(:q!, but we'll come to that another time), but because before there
were graphical windows for different apps, the video display of the
computer monitor was the endpoint for data coming from the computer
mainframe. And now terminal emulators are apps which reproduce that
simple classic experience of interacting with the out-of-sight
computational cogs through simple (or not-so-simple) text.
the shell is then the program that runs with the terminal display to actually allow you to interact with the files and folders on your computer. I suppose it's called the shell because it is/was the outermost layer of the computer's operating system.
the command line is then the line on which you type commands into the terminal to interact with the shell.
So you can now see why the terms terminal, shell, and command line often seem synonymous. But also that they are slightly, subtly different.
It's also worth remembering that as well as being able to engage with
the shell interactively, by typing commands one-by-one, and then having
the results evaluated and printed (the read-evaluate-print-loop is
sometimes called the REPL), you can also save your commands to a file
and then run the shell program on that file to implement those
instructions. Like an actor interpreting a
script.
And so we come to scripting languages. But that can wait until next time.