Hacker News Reader

Comment by throwaway892238 | Hacker News Reader

  sqlite3 :memory: -cmd '.mode csv' ...

It should be a war crime for programs in 2022 to use non-UNIX/non-GNU style command line options. Add it to the Rome Statute's Article 7 list of crimes against humanity. Full blown tribunal at The Hague presided over by the international criminal court. Punishable by having to use Visual Basic 3.0 for all programming for the rest of their life.

View on HN

The initial release of sqlite was in 2000. Yes, well after GNU-style command line options existed but not by much.

22 years is a long time to deprecate bad command line arguments.

Sqlite team idolizes backwards compatibility. Which is admirable but at the same time it means we are not getting strong static typing of tables before 2035.

Shame. Even bigger shame is that nobody else is taking the torch.

They added strong typing of tables a few months ago as an opt-in feature, hence keeping things backwards compatible: https://www.sqlite.org/stricttables.html

Yep, I know. Wish they went even further but it seems like a good start.

The documentation should focus on the 'best' way to accomplish the goal, reducing the number of people who encounter and repeat the old way. Doing anything else is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Yeah of course people are still using the old way, if some of them didn't start using it until after you added the new way.

> well after ... but not by much.

This seems a contradiction to me. Was it "well after", or after "but not by much"?

Those -cmd are actually unnecessary, you can do

    sqlite3 :memory: '.mode csv' '.import taxi.csv taxi' \
    'SELECT passenger_count, COUNT(*), AVG(total_amount) FROM taxi GROUP BY passenger_count'

Let me introduce you to bazel ...

bazel build //:--foobar --//::\\

I'm not sure what that does, but it reminds me of GNU Parallel's interface, which although smart, is not very intuitive and memorable in my experience.

Go has been doing same thing for a decade now:

https://godocs.io/flag

Personally I'm fine with it. The whole, "let's combine 5 letter options into one string", always smacked of excess code golf to me.

My VMS users say the same thing. Wow, do I not want that to happen. I am not a fan of DCL.

Would :memory: even parse in some shells?

Why wouldn't it? I'm not aware of colons being a special character in any shell I can think of

Colons are a little bit special in Bournish shells, since they're a delimiter in variable assignments after which tilde expansions, and some shells extend this behavior to command line arguments.

Frankly, I don't find it outside the realm of possibility that there's some combination of options that will make :memory: misparse on a popular shell, I just don't know of any...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com