New ask Hacker News story: Ask HN: Why were GUI tools more popular with web devs in the 2000's?

Ask HN: Why were GUI tools more popular with web devs in the 2000's?
4 by ccajas | 2 comments on Hacker News.
In the decade of 2000's we saw a plethora of graphical interfaces being used for web site and server management. We had Plesk, cPanel and WHM come into widespread use. To spin up a complete web stack all you had to do was open XAMPP, tweak a few control panel settings, and away you go. Similar with MAMP on Mac platforms. Uploading files could be done with a myriad of FTP software with drag-and-drop interfaces. Then the transition to more CLI based tools took on strongly in the 2010's and its momentum does not appear to let up. The benefits of CLI completely are discovered in that you have more control, everything is more "exposed" and with more flexibility. About the most popular GUI tool that still stands today for web devs are IDEs. I still find it peculiar that in the past web devs had more interest in user-friendly GUIs. It's peculiar because in the past, modern software development in general did start out with command line tools, but the recent past of web development was full of windowed apps, with tons of forms and visual interfaces. "CLI discovery" was rather delayed for web devs and I'm wondering why.

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