The growth of command line options, 1979-Present

14 hours ago

McIlroy's UNIX philosophy emphasizes doing one thing well, but modern commands like 'ls' have grown to include many options.
The number of command line options for common UNIX commands has dramatically increased over time, as shown in a comparison table from 1979 to 2017.
McIlroy criticizes the bloat in modern utilities, arguing that simplicity and thoughtful design have been lost.
The rise in command line options is partly due to the UNIX philosophy of handling text streams, which leads to formatting and parsing complexities.
Structured data handling, as seen in PowerShell, offers an alternative to the text-stream approach, reducing user complexity.
Modern command line tools often include convenience flags that could be replaced by combining simpler commands, adding to the bloat.
The UNIX design philosophy, which assumes a small, cohesive team, does not scale well to today's diverse and distributed development environment.
The inconsistency and complexity of UNIX tools across different systems far exceed the issues seen in criticized programming languages like PHP or JavaScript.
Modern hardware advancements make concerns about binary size bloat less relevant compared to the 1970s.
The UNIX philosophy's limitations are evident in areas like clipboard handling, where Windows' structured approach offers better usability.

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