The Command Line as Franken-REPL

[ Dear unix nerds: I am about to blow smoke. I’m so excited I might be totally wrong. ]As I have belabored before, I’ve been using Linux since I was a babe, and have gradually become comfortable doing most tasks from the command line.But my mental model of what the command line is has always been wrong!The four stages of understanding:1. The command line is scaryOkay, sure, the command line is scary. We don’t talk about that. Because the command line is scary in the same way fire or the ocean or a chainsaw or a knife or an irate grandma is scary: it’s scary because it can do things, and we don’t like all the things it can do, even though we value most of them.These things are mostly scary because we don’t know what they can do, and what they will do. There are two approaches: stay away, or try to understand them. We have already chosen the second.2. The command line is a text interface for running programsAlso technically true. This is where I was stuck for a long time.Type command.…