I had sort of an "aha" moment reading a non-technical co-workers conversation on Slack the other day. Someone built a Slackbot to show the menu for whatever food truck is outside our building that day, and people could use it just by typing "/foodtruck". They were blown away and loved it. Rather than opening a browser and navigating some disparate menu pages, they could simply fire off a command in their "console".
I realized that people love Slack because it has introduced them to the CLI paradigm of computing for the first time. CLI is so much more efficient and powerful if users can somehow be incentivized to put in the time and effort to become productive, which Slack has focused on a lot. As inefficient and silly as it may seem to us developers, Slack with it's endless command based integrations has succeed wildly at that where nothing else has so far.
I realized that people love Slack because it has introduced them to the CLI paradigm of computing for the first time. CLI is so much more efficient and powerful if users can somehow be incentivized to put in the time and effort to become productive, which Slack has focused on a lot. As inefficient and silly as it may seem to us developers, Slack with it's endless command based integrations has succeed wildly at that where nothing else has so far.