3 ms·

I feel like I didn't make "primary" clear enough - it would be like using an environment variable for the path for ls. That's gonna be a big no from me, dog.

• chriswarbo 6y ago
  > it would be like using an environment variable for the path for ls. That's gonna be a big no from me, dog Me too. My point about env vars was limited to key/value options. I'm happy to use positional arguments when names are irrelevant, e.g. `ls foo/` is better than `DIR=foo/ ls` or `ls --dir foo/` or `ls --dir=foo/` or whatever, since the latter just adds noise and increases the chance we'll get something wrong. I'm also happy to use arguments for flags which are either present or absent, where values are irrelevant, e.g. `ls --all` rather than e.g. `ALL=1 ls` or `ls --all=yes` or whatever. In this case the presence of a value is even more hamful, since the program might only be checking for the variable's presence, in which case `ALL=0 ls` would be misleading; plus we'd have to guess whether the value should be 0/1, yes/no, y/n, on/off, enable/disable, etc.