The growth of command-line options, 1979-Present

> that's the beauty of command line options -- unlike with a GUI, adding these options doesn't clutter up the interface GUIs provide discoverability so often times you don't need a manual. If you don't know how to use a command line tool you must open the manual. So in that way I would consider the man pages as part of the UI and those definitely get cluttered.

Maybe it's because I'm not the biggest Unix purist, but I don't really mind the proliferation of command line options. The two things that do irk me are: * Using short options in scripts. Scripts should almost always use long options. As a corollary, tools should always provide long options unless the tool isn't intended for scripting. * Lack of discoverability. We still don't have a standard way to ask an arbitrary tool which flags it supports, or for a…

Well for one thing, ls needs that many options in order for the joke "What is your name? / What is your mission? / What are three lowercase letters that are not valid options for the xyz version of ls?" to work.