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Gosh, what a horrible comment! The simple fact is that curl and wget's interfaces are bad, and everyone who learns to use them spends that 10 minutes. And then, if you're like me, respends that 10 minutes when I need to do something fancy again. If a new tool were to save 5 minutes (which this one does), that's 5 minutes saved on every use, which is probably a total of a few hours for me personally, and spread over the population of future users, is a few lifetimes.

Rather than admit that even incremental usability improvements are not only useful, but continue to pay dividends long after the tool is produced, you lambast the author and the effort.

Not cool.

P.S. You should watch Bret Victor again, talking about how much easier it is to crush an idea than to support it and nurture it. http://vimeo.com/36579366

All the competing tools are not "for humans." Who are they for, then? If you don't see the negativity in that sales pitch (and your own complaining about other people's creations, which were also the products of hard work) then I don't think you are being honest with yourself.

If this tool actually didn't require me to go to a man page and read lots of flags (.... exactly like every other tool) then I might be more enthusiastic about its advantages. But I don't see advantages. I just see yet another tool. Well, that's fine... use what you want. But I don't agree that it is superior in any clear way, and that's really all I said.

People who are really capable can handle and learn from critique and don't require constant sugarcoating because their minds are more at the level of problem solving than ego defense.

curl's interface is a PITA for testing JSON APIs. HTTPie's isn't:

  http POST http://localhost:3000/person/create name="James"

The "for humans" bit signifies the author has taken care to simplify the interface for practical use, rather than for shell scripting.

Yup, I was excited to see that.

I have a text file with examples of testing different kinds of API calls w/ curl, and I have to refer to it all the time because the syntax is so easy to get wrong if I just type it out. I've also had to waste lots of time supporting other developers using our API, who got tangled up in the curl syntax in the examples I provide them.

Your comment is an ad hominem attack where you falsely accuse someone of making an ad hominem attack.

You know, I was about to defend myself, but you may be right. My tone of outrage at the slurgfest being wrong was itself rather wrong. If he didn't see the long term incremental improvements this tool offers, that's nothing to be outraged over. People make mistakes.

That said, I think it's a stretch to call this mistake of mine an ad hominem attack. It doesn't fit my normal understanding of such an attack - there was no name calling, etc. And certainly I didn't accuse him of an ad hominem.

Thanks for pointing that out. I made slurgfest's comment a proxy for slurgfest when I interpreted your comment, and that is indeed a stretch. I agree that neither of you were all that harsh.

curl and wget might not follow Unix conventions all that well, but from the look of it neither does HTTPie.

Thus the GP's point stands that this program offers little more than a stylistic change. And a bit of pretty printing, which you could (ideally) pipe into some syntax highlighting script or an editor to get the same effect.

Don't read the docs with this thing, for example, and you'd wonder why it defaults to JSON encoding and not the default HTTP POST format. And so the 'simple' version is now dependent on a trend and not the HTTP standard. In fact, even with a modern API I don't recall ever having to serialise my data before posting it. So why this?

That's a few minutes wasted on RTFM already. What else will there be?

Still, you pay a one-time cost of reading the manual, then the ongoing benefit of using a nicer UI. With cURL you pay the one-time cost of reading its manual, but also pay the ongoing cost of dealing with its unintuitive, verbose, and generally less human-friendly UI.

JSON encoding is a sensible default these days for a tool to be used by humans, though I agree there's a good "principle of least surprise" argument for defaulting to plain HTTP POST. It would also be nice if it had a setting between "interpret response as JSON" and "uglify the response", but OTOH those additional formats are good opportunities for user-contributed patches.

You're totally off here. curl,wget, etc are tools that make overly complicated the most common use cases. There are 900 million command line flag options, so figuring out how to do a post & set a particular header can be 10 minutes. 10 minutes is an awfully long time for learning how to perform an HTTP request! At least on the github page I can learn the 5 things I'd actually want to do in about 3 seconds. And it colorizes the json output to make it more legible? Sweet. That's called productivity.

Interestingly enough, people seem to search for curl tutorials much more than wget: http://www.google.com/trends/?q=curl+tutorial,+wget+tutorial...

Having something that makes life easier with less complication IS what tools are all about. That's called evolution. Why have the web when you could have gopher? Because it's _better_, even if you can 'accomplish the same things.'

> Most humans don't operate the command line or write scripts to begin with.

I'm not a huge fan of cURL, but most people who use cURL don't use the command line either. They use the cURL library and access that functionality through a high level language (PHP, C, C++, whatever).

That's true, but it's no better there, either.

Here's some sample curl client code in PHP.

      $c = curl_init("https://someurl/some/api");
      $msg = /* some data here */
      $opts = array(
        CURLOPT_POST=>TRUE,
        CURLOPT_USERPWD=>"<password string>",
        CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER=>array("Content-type: application/json"),
        CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS=>$msg,
        CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER=>FALSE,
        CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER=>TRUE
      );
      curl_setopt_array($c, $opts);
      $d = curl_exec($c);
      curl_close($c);

Every option in that ugly argument array corresponds directly to a commandline option.

On the other hand I guess you could probably write a nice library that uses curl under the hood, here it's just a case of ugly design.

Indeed, I do exactly that: http://requests.ryanmccue.info/

I completely agree on cURL's design though. It's painfully obvious when working with the cURL bindings in PHP that it didn't have much thought put in to adapting it to PHP's constraints and is essentially just the command line client in a "nice" wrapper. It ends up being a huge pain to work with.

I couldn't disagree more. I wish I could disagree more, tough. Your comment shows a complete disregard for User Experience and User Interface, and this disregard is the reason why so much stuff simply "sucks" nowadays.