Why should you be able to "select the pretty green color from a photo" via the CLI?
That's my point - just because it's the wrong tool for some hyperspecific job doesn't imply anything useful in general.
But if you really want to pursue the analogy, we could in fact come up with a command line that selects the green color value from a certain area of an image a lot easier than one could edit a non-image file using MS Paint (though I've seen that done too).
I think GUIs and CLIs can both be "valuable tools for expression".
But Photoshop is an example of something that's particularly good for the GUI. It's not representative of most things that people do when they're interacting with a computer.
The main thrust of the article is that CLIs are expressive, and GUIs are not. I came up with a counter example QED.
He pushes this topic by talking about Unboundedness vs Boundedness and Internalization vs externalization. What he seems to fail to realize is that internalization and unboundness are not properties inherent to CLIs nor is externalization and Boundedness inherent to GUIs. Those properties are a function of how you designed your application and user interaction not the medium by which it is accomplished.
