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That reminds me of the original Unix philosophy: programs should succeed silently, issuing (error) messages only on failure. You had to add a --verbose flag to
by rstuart4133 6y ago
That reminds me of the original Unix philosophy: programs should succeed silently, issuing (error) messages only on failure. You had to add a --verbose flag to get it to tell you what it had done.
I'm not sure how it arose, but one observation is even in the beginning the Unix world was full of shell scripts. If every command that shell script ran was chatty, the average shell script would overwhelm you very quickly with noise.
- Too 6y agoI think that also stems from shell using the stdout as data transfer for both humans and machines at the same time, and people expect to be able to pipe the output into another process for further processing. Extra text intermittently added would make this far less repeatable and lots of extra lines to filter away before processing. Sure, you've got stderr, but most terminals will print these in the same way so a user doesn't know what is output and what is error really. Goes to show how bad such tools are for automation really.