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> If only all the younger developers were aware of how to properly develop command line applications. They are doing just fine. You can't expect them to learn

• fsckboy 4y ago
  if you want to run with that analogy, command line shells running in terminals are assets, not debt. Not knowing how to use them is poverty, lacking having assets. you can't just take the word "debt" to mean bad, then just throw it around for things you don't like, especially applied to things that take effort to learn, effort you have not and don't want to expend.
• Beltalowda 4y ago
  There is no "50 years of technical debt". If anything, a significant amount of complexity has been removed compared to the 70s and 80s when everyone and their mother was making wildly incompatible terminals (actual terminals that is, not software terminal emulators). You don't really need to know anything about shells to write a CLI app, other than basic shell conventions (- for flags, things like that). You don't even need to know all that much about terminals, just some bare basics if you want to do colours or whatnot. All of this can be summarized in a page or two. If you want to write a ncurses-like library: that's a different story. But then it's no longer a CLI app.
• theamk 4y ago
  The parent poster was likey refering to the fact that good apps should suppress colors when output is not a tty, so that all the text-processing tools work properly. This works identically in all the shells (and even without a shell), and there is no "50 years years of techinical debt" (unless you mean the idea itself of in-band control codes)