We devs are really good at answering two out of three questions:

1. How? This is the tutorial. It might be really helpful, for specifically what is being taught.

2. What? This is the reference documentation. It's often the most usable and complete resource.

3. Why? This is the context. It can only be learned by getting familiar with the environment. This journey is where we devs grow our metaphorical (and sometimes literal) neckbeards.

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We could stand to pay a lot more attention to question #3. The contexts we have surrounded ourselves with are messy, conflicted, incompatible, and surprising. Some particularly savvy devs have made incredibly powerful tools to help clean up this mess, yet somehow those tools are some of the least noob-friendly software we have! How did we get here? Is there any way out?

I think the most uninviting part of our environment is also the most familiar: the shell. There are a lot of pokey bits that we really don't need anymore: escape sequences, suspend, environment variables, etc. What would happen if we took a serious look at starting from scratch? Could we do better than a REPL?

It's pretty incredible that after all these years, no one has actually made a real competitive alternative to the shell, and I have a theory for how we got here. The GUI model was created by corporations for proprietary software. We call them "applications", because they are supposed to cater to a specific predetermined use case, which is precisely what makes them inferior to shell utilities. This development model isn't limited to GUI either: apps have taken over the entire development scene.

I think if we really started fresh, we could revolutionize modern software to be more compatible, flexible, and malleable than any application could ever be. That's what a shell is already, which is why we devs never want to leave it behind.