> It's not clear to me what is "ugly" about not having to keep alternating between - and -- as you spell out options on the command line. It's about the princi

> It's not clear to me what is "ugly" about not having to keep alternating between - and -- as you spell out options on the command line. It's about the principle of least surprise. Regardless of whether double-dash opts came from UNIX or GNU (and obviously you are correct in that they came from BSD/GNU), they're the convention nowadays and it's less confusing for end users to just embrace the convention. Go has bucked the (recent) tradition on a lot of different fronts, which I love it for, but the flag package -- the interface to the users of the software, not the authors -- is one place I don't really think it's quite as appropriate. Certainly, Google is able to make these sort of changes in its internal world, and reach a high enough percentage of software that the new choice becomes normal, but Go will probably never have enough mindshare in the extraGoogle for its CLI parsing to not be "a little weird". --- As an addendum, I happily use the builtin flag package for software that is consumed primarily by my team. For software I expect other teams to use, who don't necessarily care about the fact that it was written in Go, I prefer pflag.