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Comment by eterps | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

What, like rm -rf ?

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.

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.

"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

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.

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