Every domain - whether it be physics, chemistry, electrical systems, biology, and yes, even computing systems, has an initial training window in which the practitioner requires some training on the the basic elements of the toolset. Initially, it's painful, and annoying, as you are literally starting from the ground, and you have no understanding of even the language to understand the instructions you are being given. But, eventually you develop a vocabulary, and learn the rudiments of the tools - even if they are completely peripheral to your actual domain of research.
I have a friend who wanted to be a cook - she was interested in food, when she went to chef school for a couple years, and she was learning how to cook meat, they spent two-three days just talking about knives. Apparently knives are very important to chefs. So they taught her about the metals, the edges, the sharpening, the care and maintenance - the entire science of knives. She went in with no expectations she was going to have to learn any of this stuff - but before she could start cooking, she had to learn how to use her tools, and jigs, and moran edges, and Scandinavian Grind, and what the hell does this have to do with cooking again?
Same with working in a field that requires you use software systems. The command-line is your toolset. Master it, and you can do anything. Don't master it, and you are like a chef who is using whatever knives happen to be in the kitchen, and in whatever condition they happen to be in.
But, if he thinks that we have "command-line bullshittery" today, when 95% of the time I can just type "brew install foo", or "apt-get update bar", and have a pretty damn good chance that 95% of my dependencies are fullfilled, and if not, a quick google of the error message will usually give me a stack-exchange/server-fault/stack-overflow solution, I can't imagine what he thought working with these systems was like in the 1990s...
I have a friend who wanted to be a cook - she was interested in food, when she went to chef school for a couple years, and she was learning how to cook meat, they spent two-three days just talking about knives. Apparently knives are very important to chefs. So they taught her about the metals, the edges, the sharpening, the care and maintenance - the entire science of knives. She went in with no expectations she was going to have to learn any of this stuff - but before she could start cooking, she had to learn how to use her tools, and jigs, and moran edges, and Scandinavian Grind, and what the hell does this have to do with cooking again?
Same with working in a field that requires you use software systems. The command-line is your toolset. Master it, and you can do anything. Don't master it, and you are like a chef who is using whatever knives happen to be in the kitchen, and in whatever condition they happen to be in.
But, if he thinks that we have "command-line bullshittery" today, when 95% of the time I can just type "brew install foo", or "apt-get update bar", and have a pretty damn good chance that 95% of my dependencies are fullfilled, and if not, a quick google of the error message will usually give me a stack-exchange/server-fault/stack-overflow solution, I can't imagine what he thought working with these systems was like in the 1990s...