somewhat logical, but entirely in practice verb-noun command structure.

That’s supposed to be “impractical”, not “in practice”, for others reading along.

For example, the “proper” command to list a directory is: Get-ChildItem
The “proper” command to fetch a webpage is: Invoke-WebRequest https://example.com/

In these particular cases, they do have aliases defined, so you can use ls, dir and curl instead, but …yeah, that’s still generally what the command names are like.

It’s partially more verbose than C#, which is one of the most verbose programming languages out there. I genuinely feel like this kind of defeats the point of having a scripting language in the first place, when it isn’t succinct.
Like, you’re hardly going to use it interactively, because it is so verbose, so you won’t know the commands very well. Which means, if you go to write a script with Powershell, you’ll need to look up how to do everything just as much as with a full-fledged programming language. And I do typically prefer the better tooling of a full-fledged programming language…

I’ve been trying to basically build a library that helps you put together a distribution archive.
And my initial plan for the API looked something like this:

Distribution::new("my-program")
    .dir("assets")
    .file("favicon.png", |path| build_favicon(path));  // "|path| ..." is a lambda function that gets the target path passed in

So, it would allow you to define the file structure, and for the parts that actually need to be built, you’d provide a lambda function, which it would automatically run or not, depending on whether the inputs changed.

Right, inputs, what are those? I kind of need my user to tell me. So, I decided to implement the caching as a separate API, which you would call on your own when you get called by the lambda function.

Then I realized, I kind of don’t need the lambda function then. I could just construct file paths and then my user calls their build_favicon(...) function or similar on their own.

There is just one crucial problem with that. This is what the path API in the stdlib looks like:

PathBuf::new("my-program")
    .join("assets")
    .join("favicon.png");

I might not have built anything, really. 🫠

Yeah, fair enough.

Depends on the distro how that alias is defined (if it is defined)…

I just want to say that you’re probably worrying too much about it. Of course, there is lots of things one can do to improve security (which the others here are listing dutifully) and it is foolish to just assume that one’s computer is entirely secure, because as a user, you will always have the ability to bypass that.

But there’s a pretty firm consensus in the IT industry that Linux is more secure than Windows. And that the popular Linux distributions are more trustworthy organizations than Microsoft.

So, it’s good to inform yourself, but if you survived on Windows, you at least should not worry about the Linux side of things. It’s more than fine.

Yeah, I kind of respect the stance, because it knows what it wants to be, but I also wrap number types into a separate data type to document that maybe you shouldn’t multiply a port number by the wheel count and pass that into the temperature parameter, because I want more fine-grained typing, not one-size-fits-all.

Groovy will automatically convert integers into objects, as it sees fit. And one such case is when you assign null to an integer.

There’s some more languages, which try to treat primitive types like objects, to make them more consistently usable. As I understand, nullability is a big part of the reason why it can’t be solved with syntactic sugar, so presumably this would be possible in all those languages.
If I’m not mistaken, Ruby is another one of those languages.

I believe, that would mean that any 0 is equivalent to the null pointer, since the null pointer is just memory address 0…

I do agree, yeah. If we would have auto-detection, I’d want a manual override to be implemented for sure.
It’s a CLI, so it wouldn’t be too bad to add a --browser=firefox flag or similar, but it just makes it even more obvious that this feature only adds complexity, because we would have two solutions when we hardly needed one.

We currently have a semi-serious project at $DAYJOB, like we’re basically allowed to work on it as a team building thing. And one guy who’s tugging along has ten years more programming experience than me, but no experience with the programming language we’re using, so he’s been generating everything with LLMs.

He knows to write unit tests and well, the programming language in question is Rust, which’s strict compiler prevents lots of bad code from happening. So, this isn’t your stereotypical vibecoding.

But …yeah, it’s still been challenging to work with.

Yesterday, the guy built a feature which basically gives the user instructions how to create a bookmark in their browser. There’s a few ways to implement this:

• You don’t. Our userbase is gonna be technical, they probably know how to do that.
• You show the instructions for all browsers and let the user pick which instructions to follow.
• You ask the user interactively what browser to set up and then show them only the instructions for the chosen browser.

Right, and apparently the fourth way to implement this, which the LLM generated, is to detect what the default browser of the user is.

Leaving aside the problem that some users will want to set up different browsers than their default browser, how do you implement that? Is there some nice, cross-platform API for it? Well, if there is, the LLM didn’t know about it.
And neither are there nice APIs per operating system. On macOS and Linux, it runs some random commands to access this information. On Windows, the generated code looks at the Registry.

All of this is absolutely horrid to maintain. I do not want to be testing on each OS separately. I do not want hundreds of lines of code for a feature that’s not actually needed. And the worst part is, the guy should know this. He has the experience.
But I’ve seen the guy when he chats with an LLM, just falls into an absolute trance. Does not surprise me that he’s unable to take a step back to think, if this even makes sense to do…

It says “global” in the meme, so presumably all of them…

Fish is not the worst in this regard, because:

• The defaults are pretty good, so you don’t typically need a config file for it to be usable.
• As of version 4.0, Fish is (experimentally) available as a single executable for download from their GitHub page. So, even on hosts where you can’t install anything, you may still be able to copy that executable file onto there and use it.

But there may still be situations where it’s annoying, like if you’re working in a container, then you likely don’t want to mount your fish executable every time.

But I also have to say I don’t find it too big of a deal.
I still use Bash for scripting (just throw a #!/bin/sh or #!/bin/bash at the top of your script, like you should anyways), and then for interactive use, not that much of the shell syntax comes into play anyways.
And if I ever do need to copy a complex Bash command into an interactive shell, I can just run bash, then run the command in there and then exit back out.

In the sense that “on the spectrum” is often used to say that someone has autistic traits, yeah. But there would still be a spectrum and everyone would be on it, it would just reach from no autistic traits to maximum autism.

Polandball would be another web comic like that. Although the characters are just circles with flags in them, so no idea how useful that is.

You technically didn’t ask for them, but presumably this goes hand-in-hand with reduce and reuse as first steps, which would have perhaps a more visible impact.

Reduce means to cut back on the amount of products we produce in the first place, particularly also the trash being used for packaging.
This would require:

• More craftsmanship. Instead of buying a new jeans when your pants have a hole, you’d sew them.
• More robust, repairable products. Don’t need to throw away the whole phone due to a broken screen when it doesn’t break in the first place or if you can get the screen replaced.
• More sharing. Not every household needs their own car or toolbox or whatever, if you can share them with your neighbors.
• There would be more shops that sell products unpackaged, where you bring your own containers to fill.

Reuse means to sell products in glass jars, metal boxes or similar, which can be washed out and filled anew.
This would require:

• Some container-deposit system, so that you can bring your emptied glass jars etc. back to the shops and the shop sends it back to the producer.
• In that vein, there would need to be a tax on non-reusable packaging to finance the recycling or safe deposition of it.
• Some products would probably be sold in larger quantities or not anymore, because they just aren’t sustainable, if you make them pay their environmental costs.

As for recycling, i.e. breaking the thing down and creating a new thing, it’s unlikely that we would ever reach 100% with it alone, at the very least because it’s more effort than reduce and reuse.
But to improve our rates, there is a whole load of products currently being sold in plastic, which could be sold in paper or wood, if glass jars or metal boxes don’t work there.

In a hypothetical world, where we could have 100% effective recycling without giving a toss about reduce and reuse, then I guess, we’d have a garbage disposal system which funnels right back into a massive 3D printer.

It’s not like the cat got hurt. It’s just a silly color for a few weeks.

I imagine, they wash the spices out with water afterwards. I doubt the discolored hair taste of anything.

Ah, fair enough. Not sure how to do that then.

I was gonna say, I feel like the current method does a good enough job documenting that validation has happened, but I guess you do want it reflected in the structure of the type, so that the code that takes the information from the struct can safely make the assumption that some of the options don’t exist. And then, yeah, it would be nice to not need a separate parsing step for that.

Just to note, I disagree entirely. Even in commercial development, it’s the core premise of agile development to ship features early and continuously integrate feedback. Granted, lots of companies claim to do agile without actually doing it, but it’s at least not a law of nature what you’re describing.

But with this not being commercial development either way, I really don’t feel like you can make any predictions. If the volunteer that implemented this sees your bug report, they could decide to drop everything else and fix that, because they get to pick their own priorities. They might have the solution in their head right away and it doesn’t take them long at all to implement. Or someone new to the project might decide this sounds like a good issue to get started with.

Clap has dependent options and mutually-exclusive argument groups built-in: https://docs.rs/clap/latest/clap/_derive/_tutorial/index.html#argument-relations

For the environment-specific requirements, you can use compiler feature flags…