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Eric S. Raymond, in his guide "The Art of Unix Programming", mentions this principle as Rule of Silence: "When a program has nothing surprising to say, it shoul

by eterps 3y ago

Eric S. Raymond, in his guide "The Art of Unix Programming", mentions this principle as Rule of Silence: "When a program has nothing surprising to say, it should say nothing." His statement probably related to command line applications, but it makes sense for a lot of cases.

pydry 3y ago
It sounds smart but what counts as surprising is entirely context dependent and most programs won't be aware of your context. E.g. a command line app where you put a subtly wrong switch in that does exactly what it thought you wanted and prints nothing while outputting a 0 exit code is dangerous.
- loloquwowndueo 3y ago
  What, like rm -rf ?
- couchand 3y ago
  It's about context, of course, but it's not really the program's responsibility to know the user's context. It's the user's responsibility to understand their own context. A tool should have sufficient interlocks to ensure safety when not engaged, but no more.
- 9dev 3y ago
  I follow your point, however it actually supports mine: An HTTP response isn’t intended to be the output of a command line app. A command line app should take the response from the lower-level HTTP communication and articulate whatever appropriate message to the user, depending on the verbosity level for example. Talking in OSI terms - this is a presentation layer problem, not a link layer one.
laserDinosaur 3y ago
"When a program has nothing surprising to say, it should say nothing." Which sounds good in theory, until you run into issues like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tLdRBsuvVKc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tLdRBsuvVKc TLDW: Most of the Gitlabs outage where they deleted the primary prod and backup prod database could have been solved if they just waited for the command line op to complete - but because of a lack of feedback they thought it had frozen, leading to several other plans which made the situation worse.

by eterps 3y ago

pydry 3y ago

It sounds smart but what counts as surprising is entirely context dependent and most programs won't be aware of your context. E.g. a command line app where you put a subtly wrong switch in that does exactly what it thought you wanted and prints nothing while outputting a 0 exit code is dangerous.

loloquwowndueo 3y ago
What, like rm -rf ?
couchand 3y ago
It's about context, of course, but it's not really the program's responsibility to know the user's context. It's the user's responsibility to understand their own context. A tool should have sufficient interlocks to ensure safety when not engaged, but no more.
9dev 3y ago
I follow your point, however it actually supports mine: An HTTP response isn’t intended to be the output of a command line app. A command line app should take the response from the lower-level HTTP communication and articulate whatever appropriate message to the user, depending on the verbosity level for example. Talking in OSI terms - this is a presentation layer problem, not a link layer one.

laserDinosaur 3y ago

"When a program has nothing surprising to say, it should say nothing." Which sounds good in theory, until you run into issues like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tLdRBsuvVKc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tLdRBsuvVKc TLDW: Most of the Gitlabs outage where they deleted the primary prod and backup prod database could have been solved if they just waited for the command line op to complete - but because of a lack of feedback they thought it had frozen, leading to several other plans which made the situation worse.