Visual editors are not as trustworthy as the command line

That, at least, is what a blog post I stumbled into today saying.

Let the flame war begin. Is the post:
a) right to the point;
b) dead wrong;
c) N/A?

I'd say good to have both a GUI for conveniance and overview, and the command line for critical debugging. Both have their point of view. Programmers, however, should not put much trust in any GUI. Programmers should develop a feeling for if things shown in a GUI are right or wrong.

So, I vote for b) - the post above is wrong, and one-sided.

Personally I don't feel that it has as much to do with "trustworthiness" as it does with the fact that most GUI users probably don't completely understand what the GUI application is doing for them behind the scenes. If you are using a tool that is abstracting certain aspects of the underlying technology without having an understanding what those things are then you may well end up in trouble as a result.

I believe being able to survive on the command line is something any MySQL developer should be capable of doing, but I also see plenty of benefit in using GUI editors when the time calls for it (which is often if you have a good understanding of both the underlying database software itself as well as what "features" the GUI is providing for you and what the implications of those assumptions actually are).

Apparently, he's a teacher talking about this students. It's pretty obvious that you can't learn SQL if a GUI tool does everything for you, for the same reason that you can't learn Visual Basic by dragging widgets from Visual Studio. What's actually not trustworthy is doing stuff you don't understand.