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Comment by hiAndrewQuinn

1 year ago

>There is no such thing as a small legacy codebase

Very true. As a followup, I think it's worth pointing out that CLI applications in particular can cram a lot of functionality into very few LOC.

Last night, I read through the source code for `cat` (yes, that `cat`) and it was only about 800 lines of fairly breezy C: https://github.com/coreutils/coreutils/blob/master/src/cat.c

And a tiny CLI tool I use every day, several times a day, for learning Finnish, is about 200 lines of Python: https://github.com/hiAndrewQuinn/finstem

The command line is an absolutely amazing standard where a lot of hard things are just solved by the underlining layers in a way that is both very simple to use and very flexible.

As the article said, some times a complicated problem has a simple genial solution.