fair, there are commandline tools by third parties that dont conform. From reading your other comments, though, I can tell that you likely don't enjoy learning complicated systems in order to leverage them for your advantage. Just like the author of the article, you complain on and on, without displaying any sort of passion for the good things this complexity brings.
That's a deeply unfair way of characterizing that. I love UNIX shell, but it is unquestionably true that it has a lot of cruft and could be a lot better designed. It's possible to both appreciate and enjoy learning complicated systems while recognizing that complexity is in and of itself a bad thing that should be reduced to the greatest possible extent.
All command line tools are by third parties. There is no first party.
And it brings no good things. This is entirely superfluous complexity. You could have all the benefits with far less complexity if you just put in the effort to build and design things.
But we don't. We've decided that it is impossible to do so. And many people have decided that knowing all of these obscurities makes them smart, and they will look down on anyone who doesn't.
To put that another way: not all command-line applications follow the POSIX/GNU command-line conventions. [0][1][2] I agree that all new command-line applications should do so. It's annoying that Java uses java -version rather than java --version, and I can't see why they couldn't just add support for --version, as they wouldn't have to remove the existing -version.
> many people have decided that knowing all of these obscurities makes them smart, and they will look down on anyone who doesn't.
I don't think it's sysadmins who are pushing for this messy state of affairs, it's that various specific projects refuse to follow the POSIX conventions, presumably for reasons of backward compatibility/general resistance to change.
