Folks, this prof isn't saying the command line isn't worth knowing. He's saying that learning it costs time which would be better spent on actual research. Becoming the three-millionth sed expert does not expand CS.
The command line is the best available technology for many tasks. We're going to need these skills for the foreseeable future and maybe forever. CS PhD students are trainees and its OK if they invest in learning it. But for the prof, it's completely reasonable and rational to want to minimize the total time his group spends on this stuff, for productivity's sake.
I'm a CS prof and I spend way too much time wrestling with flaky build scripts, incorrect docs, overly-specific dependencies, etc, because the original author did not put in the extra effort to make the code usable by a third party. This apparent economy costs a huge amount of other people's time.
Bearing this stuff in mind, a prof can actively try to minimize this overhead by (i) decent design, (ii) a bit of spit and polish before releasing code, and (iii) maintaining lab environments that already work (VM/container images, etc.). Let's train the students to care about this stuff.
edit: To clarify, I'm not saying that the author of some open source code owes me anything in terms of usability or my time. But if they want to maximize their impact, a little effort in that direction can pay off. Like writing a paper that is easy to follow rather than an ugly brain-dump.
The command line is the best available technology for many tasks. We're going to need these skills for the foreseeable future and maybe forever. CS PhD students are trainees and its OK if they invest in learning it. But for the prof, it's completely reasonable and rational to want to minimize the total time his group spends on this stuff, for productivity's sake.
I'm a CS prof and I spend way too much time wrestling with flaky build scripts, incorrect docs, overly-specific dependencies, etc, because the original author did not put in the extra effort to make the code usable by a third party. This apparent economy costs a huge amount of other people's time.
Bearing this stuff in mind, a prof can actively try to minimize this overhead by (i) decent design, (ii) a bit of spit and polish before releasing code, and (iii) maintaining lab environments that already work (VM/container images, etc.). Let's train the students to care about this stuff.
edit: To clarify, I'm not saying that the author of some open source code owes me anything in terms of usability or my time. But if they want to maximize their impact, a little effort in that direction can pay off. Like writing a paper that is easy to follow rather than an ugly brain-dump.