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Comment by swiftcoder | Hacker News Reader

The fact that they already special-cased the parser to let you know that you used the wrong help option, but didn't just forward to the right one, is just incredibly pedantic

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Likely they print that message for any unknown argument.

It's probably fuzzy similarity search

If you can bother writing a fuzzy similarity search, you can just short-circuit it on "--help". Most software I see with such problems do neither.

I think the idea is that fuzzy search makes it easier for users to spot typos and this is a general feature of the flag library not something specific for --help.

Short-circuit any typo may be dangerous.

Now, an argument can be made for including as many aliases for "help" and "version" as possible but that's a different story

You can of course - I think the point here is it's different people with different goals writing the CLI lib vs the application.

So it's often not the case that a single person who made the decision to have a message that says "you asked for help, but you did it wrong; before I give you help you have to ask correctly."

"this dependency I picked at random from CPAN doesn't support that" is a pretty weak excuse for shipping a poor user experience

I don’t think people bother to write them, more likely it’s built in to whatever cli lib they happen to be using and they enable it.

sorry, you've typed "[em][en]h[Cyrillic]lp", try again

Is it? It is helping you. Your first tip: here's what the argument syntax looks like, use it.

It's "helping" in an incredibly pedantic and unhelpful way. The developer has opted to add explicit support for the common option, but only as a means to tell the user that they are "holding it wrong" (in the immortal words of Apple)

When I was a kid, I was playing Beyond Zork, and one night when I was very tired I came across a pterodactyl. Unfortunately, I kept making typos.

>> aim wand at perodactyl

> I see no perodactyl here.

>> aim wand at pterodacyl

> I see no pterodacyl here.

Frustrated at my continuing mistakes, I decided to try to short-circuit their logic. Despite knowing the difference, I typed this:

> aim wand at bird

And the game replied:

> a pterodactyl is not a bird

I LOLed at that, thank you. Infocom games were amazing.

Haha. “The developers thought of everything” (not really though)

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