Steven, > Could anyone point me to papers or other work investigating and > describing the usability of command line interfaces, especially in the > context of software development?
There was a lot of early HCI work on command line interfaces (unsurprising, as that's what they had to work on). Take a look at the table of contents for the first CHI conference in Gaithersburg 1982 (available from the ACM Portal). The first 5 papers listed are on command lines (including an earlier paper by Barnard, Hammond & MacLean, that you might find easier to obtain than the one Thomas mentioned). I wouldn't worry too much about the lack of a software development context (as noted by Thomas), because in those days there was a partial assumption that most people using computers were software developers. Researchers were only just starting to get to grips with the problem of the end user, but the archetype of the end user was then a secretary, and usability studies of end users tended to focus on text editors. I would have thought that much of the early research done on command line usability is in fact still relevant to software development. Thomas may be able to correct me if I've over-simplifed here. Alan -- Alan Blackwell Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/users/afb21/ Phone: +44 (0) 1223 334418 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- PPIG Discuss List ([email protected]) Discuss admin: http://limitlessmail.net/mailman/listinfo/discuss Announce admin: http://limitlessmail.net/mailman/listinfo/announce PPIG Discuss archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/discuss%40ppig.org/
