Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
Good CLI Design Is Mostly Silence (yarlson.dev)
10 points by ankitg12 4 hours ago
2 comments

https://paulgraham.com/talk.html

In particular, the PG essay contains exactly one designed-to-be-quoted pat-yourself-on-the-back really-send-it-home-ism:

> Informal language is the athletic clothing of ideas.

This entire link is nothing but those. I don't feel like I'm being spoken to, let alone taught to. I feel like I'm being repeatedly poked with a finger that really wants me to know it has punchy ideas. Which backfires, ofc.

A command is something I shout to an underling or my shell prompt. My shell interpreter takes my command, parses it and calls the necessary tool, be it a builtin or an executable.

I tell Tom to fetch the morning paper from the yard. Is Tom a command? No, Tom is my son.