Donald Norman has claimed that UNIX has cryptic and inconsistent command names. As Michael Lesk has remarked, the lack of objective data makes it difficult to evaluate the significance of Norman's criticisms. In an effort to explore this controversy we taught one group of novice users the UNIX command language and another group an English-based command language (NUIX). The number of errors and calls for on-line assistance were compared. The subjects in this study were 22 high school women with no formal exposure to computers. The results reveal that the UNIX group made fewer errors than the NUIX group in two training sessions a week apart. Although calls for on-line assistance for the two groups in the first session were comparable, the UNIX group made over twice as many calls for on-line assistance in the second session as the NUIX group. Our findings suggest that even though the UNIX command language may not be harder for novice users to learn, it is probably more difficult for them to use.