This is kind of my "CLI bigotry" showing, but I think programming was always, quite naturally, a command-line occupation, but there was this brief period starting in the late 90s where a sizable number of practitioners were seduced by things like Visual Studio and Eclipse, and went over to the dark side. But nature is slowly restoring itself, and we're moving back to software development being text based tools inside a bunch of terminals, like god intended.

Eclipse and IDEA are just different tools for managing text. Yes, they run in GUI windows instead of a tty but that doesn't change their nature, they're not "visual programming".

Automation and scripting won. The GUI was useful for the end user and, yes, VB was everywhere, but for tedious tasks the CLI it's still far superior and the TUI responsiveness was unmatched against the most powerful GUI.

> like god intended

Meanwhile John Carmack was using an IDE the whole time - Maybe he was just in a different realm.

I tend to agree with the trend of the parents comment. The CLI came along with the horde, like the english language or javascript.