> I don't think that CLIs are more suited to either humans or computers. CLIs are flexible enough to be effectively used by both.
Either a human is sitting at a terminal typing commands, or a human is sitting at a text editor writing a shell script, or a human is writing a program which runs other commands. In all cases, it's a bunch of strings pasted together and the computer can't typecheck it, so we need to make sure that the strings are readable by humans.
> Well, you're breaking everybody's expectations and many years of conventions by doing it. Saving one dash with every flag and losing the ability to combine short options is just not a good trade off.
If you've named your account on HN "gnubison", it's safe to say that you've got some biases. It might surprise you to know, then, that plenty of programs already don't let you combine short options, and that not everybody uses getopt_long or something compatible.
Combining short flags saves you a small amount of typing sometimes, but it adds extra confusion. So in general, I would say that most commands should not allow you to combine short flags.
Perhaps short options are unreadable. But if I see a shell script that contains a long option with only one dash, I will definitely be confused... I don't think that saving a dash makes a shell script more readable. It definitely doesn't improve the situation enough to justify messing with people's preconceived ideas.
I don't even know what to say about your assumption that I'm biased because of my username. One might even claim that you're the narrow minded person to be judging people's biases based on three letters in their username.
Which programs don't allow you to combine short options? Other than perhaps hastily written shell scripts. getopt(3) is POSIX AFAIK so there's not really any excuse for POSIX programs to not handle combined short options.
Either a human is sitting at a terminal typing commands, or a human is sitting at a text editor writing a shell script, or a human is writing a program which runs other commands. In all cases, it's a bunch of strings pasted together and the computer can't typecheck it, so we need to make sure that the strings are readable by humans.
> Well, you're breaking everybody's expectations and many years of conventions by doing it. Saving one dash with every flag and losing the ability to combine short options is just not a good trade off.
If you've named your account on HN "gnubison", it's safe to say that you've got some biases. It might surprise you to know, then, that plenty of programs already don't let you combine short options, and that not everybody uses getopt_long or something compatible.
Combining short flags saves you a small amount of typing sometimes, but it adds extra confusion. So in general, I would say that most commands should not allow you to combine short flags.