There’s a case to be made for making things easier — particularly for newcomers. And of course, there’s a case to be made for keeping things as they are, and expecting everyone — newcomers included — to learn the basics and gain some ground-level proficiency.

I’ve seen more than a few web sites and forums drop links to betty over the past couple months, most touting it as a way to use natural (English) language patterns at the console. For Linux newcomers or CLI-o-phobes, betty is probably a godsend.

As I understand it, betty interprets a request and attempts to link it to a standard Unix-ish command. I like the idea; it suggests one could send instructions to a computer, using natural language (or perhaps even speech-to-text), and expect an intelligible answer or appropriate action.

Usually betty does a pretty good job, so long as she (I’ll just call her “she” for convenience 😉 ) can figure out what you want.

And that’s the real trick: Making sure what you want is what betty understands. For example, she has no issue at all with this:

kmandla@6m47421: ~/downloads$ betty how many words are in this directory

She dutifully replies with:

Betty: Running find . -type f -exec wc -w {} \; | awk '{total += $1} END {print total}'
100

which in this case, was correct. Unfortunately, ask

kmandla@6m47421: ~/downloads$ betty how many files are in this directory

and betty returns:

Betty: I don't understand. Hopefully someone will make a pull request so that one day I will understand.

It’s odd to me that betty can tear apart a directory to count out individual words, but gets confused when asked how many files there are. Is word counting in a directory a command used so frequently that it gets taught to betty? I honestly don’t recall ever needing that before, although I daresay I could piece it together on my own, if I had to.

Moreover, is it really more convenient to type out “betty whats my username” — and here, it’s actually important to deviate from correct English punctuation, because the apostrophe would throw bash into a tailspin — than just to use whoami? whoami is shorter, and given that it’s just a contraction of the natural English words “who am i”, I don’t see how betty’s way is an improvement.

betty’s git page has a long list of precise commands she understands, and can reply to. I have an even longer list of precise commands that betty has no knowledge of, and can’t seem to comprehend — most of which are just one-word changes, like above.

It’s my unfortunate opinion that betty is no more effective or efficient than a mile-long .bashrc jam-packed with aliases for specific commands. If betty doesn’t actually pick apart and interpret a command, in the same way a valid artificial intelligence might, then what betty actually does is obfuscate things: She turns most basic commands, some of which were derived from natural language, into longer commands that carry their own eccentricities.

In other words, betty is the anti-alias. 😯

The entire business reminds me of a time a few years ago, when I accompanied our CEO on a survey of a local school building in Japan. In the lull between our arrival and meeting the school representative, my boss showed me his smartphone, and demonstrated how it could interpret his speech and return a map showing directions to the school.

Except it didn’t work. He tried four or five times, rephrased his question four or five different ways each time, and the closest he got was the home page for the school. The arrival of the representative saved him the embarrassment of admitting it wasn’t as great as he liked, and me the embarrassment of pointing out that he could have gotten the same information directly, 10 minutes earlier, if he had taken charge of the situation and sought out the map himself.

Shortcuts and gee-whiz tools aren’t really improvements if they don’t work in the way people think and behave. Expecting someone to type out the exact line “betty please tell me what is the weather like in London” (which is supposedly a valid command but returned an error from the git version I installed in Arch) is not an improvement for anyone who instinctively asks, “betty what is the weather in London” or “betty what is the weather report for London”.

On the other hand, learning whoami and its syntax means you can probably navigate almost any variation on “betty whats my username” … with or without the punctuation errors.

I didn’t intend for this to be a hate-fest against betty; as I said above, I like the idea, and I think were it to actually parse and deconstruct language and find a likely solution, it would be near-genius.

My complaint is partly in the fact that, as it is, it’s no improvement — in fact, it’s quite the opposite. And partly in the fact that, as it is, I can get the same results from a long, long list of aliases.

And partly in the fact that, as things are, Linux users seem too eager to join the cult of personality of any tool that “streamlines” console lifestyle, without really taking into account what the tool does … or doesn’t do. 😐