The classic Mac OS did not even have a command line interface, so people who began their programming careers in the Apple world between 1984 and 2001-2002 would only have had reason to learn how to use one out of curiosity, or if they happened to be doing cross-platform work with a Unix system. I had a wee bit of Apple II experience prior to the Macintosh, and I suppose you could call the various BBS interfaces I used a form of "command line", but for the most part I never touched a command line as we know it today until the late '90s when I started messing around with Linux and with shell accounts on the Internet.
While I've never been part of the Windows world myself, it has always seemed to me that the DOS command line plays a much smaller role there than the shell does in the Unix world. From '97 or so onward it has always been possible to buy a copy of Visual Studio and use it to build software without ever touching a command line, and I'm sure a great many people have done so.
> While I've never been part of the Windows world myself, it has always seemed to me that the DOS command line plays a much smaller role there than the shell does in the Unix world.
Indeed. It was possible to meaningfully use the command line up through, say, Windows 98 SE or so, once Windows XP hit, it became a relic, stuck in the command.com era while the actual OS kernel moved away from the DOS-hybrid of the Windows 95 era with the shift to Windows NT-derived OSes.
Power Shell (or however that's branded... CamelCase? Alloneword? Hyphenated?) promises to make the Windows command line relevant again, but I honestly don't know if you can meaningfully use a Windows system from only the command line these days. You probably can't use a desktop Windows system that way, which means the command line is still effectively frozen out from the real world.
PowerShell is a really cool, powerful tool. Though, it's really more of what you'd consider a modern REPL to be than a conventional shell. It takes an OO approach to scripting as well.
For some reason, I seems like it's a hard sell for a lot of .NET developers. A substantial number never leave Visual Studio and old habits are hard to break. I left that ecosystem many years ago, but still try to keep up with it.
While I've never been part of the Windows world myself, it has always seemed to me that the DOS command line plays a much smaller role there than the shell does in the Unix world. From '97 or so onward it has always been possible to buy a copy of Visual Studio and use it to build software without ever touching a command line, and I'm sure a great many people have done so.