Maybe we Should Stop Creating Inscrutable CLIs · Philosophical Hacker

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In the original Unix tradition, command-line options are single letters preceded by a single hyphen…The original Unix style evolved on slow ASR-33 teletypes that made terseness a virtue; thus the single-letter options.Eric Steven Raymond, The Art of Unix ProgrammingPrograms must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute.Abelson et. al., Structure and Interpretation of Computer ProgramsI just wrote this little bash-ism the other day for removing all attachments from a jira ticket:jira attach list {{args.ticket}} \ cut -sf 2 -d \ \ sed 's/ //g' \ xargs -L 1 -I % jira attach rm %It’s a neat little piece of code. I was happy to have it written, but I was also annoyed at how much time I spent in man pages and stack overflow to get it done.This code is pretty typical for bash, and unless you’ve committed the commands and flags of each command to memory, it’s pretty much impossible to guess what it does. Hold that thought.Consider another w…