I've heard people say that there isn't really any alternative to this kind
of complexity for command line tools, but people who say that have never
really tried the alternative, something like PowerShell. I have plenty of
complaints about PowerShell, but passing structured data around and easily
being able to operate on structured data without having to hold metadata
information in my head so that I can pass the appropriate metadata to the
right command line tools at that right places the pipeline isn't among my
complaints3 <https://danluu.com/cli-complexity/#fn:W>.

Somewhat disingenuous.  I mean, yes, that's true, but on the other hand it
means that you have to keep the "what Powershell commands operate on what
structure" in your head instead, since you can no longer assume the
pipelines to be a universal interface.

Same basic problem as CMS Pipelines.  Fantastically powerful, and nowhere
near as easy to compose good functionality as "it's just a byte stream."

Adam

On Tue, Mar 3, 2020 at 11:16 AM Jon Steinhart <jon@fourwinds.com> wrote:

> OK, this should be good for some conversation.  A friend sent me this
> link today: http://danluu.com/cli-complexity/
>