> The “best possible syntax” is a universe of possibilities - environment variables are, thankfully, limited to strings. The same can be said for command line

> The “best possible syntax” is a universe of possibilities - environment variables are, thankfully, limited to strings. The same can be said for command line arguments. I usually prefer those instead of environment variables, because they must be explicitly specified instead of being implicitly passed by the parent process. I think of env vars as being more useful when repetitively calling commands interactively, to save some typing, or when you really do want processes to inherit config from parents (like PATH and its variants). But overall I still agree with your sentiment.