SE Radio 702: Derick Schaefer on Modern CLIs

Derick Schaefer, author of CLI: A Practical Guide to Creating Modern Command-Line Interfaces, talks with host Robert Blumen about command-line interfaces old and new. Starting with a short review of the origin of commands in the early unix systems, they trace the evolution of commands into modern CLIs. Following the historic rise, fall, and re-emergence of CLIs, they consider innovative examples such as git, github, WordPress, and warp. Schaefer clarifies whether commands are the same as CLIs and then discusses a range of topics, including implementation languages, packages in the golang ecosystem for CLI development, CLIs and APIs, CLIs and AIs, AI tooling versus MCP, the object-command pattern, command flags, API authentication, whether CLIs should be stateless, and output formats - json, rich text.

Brought to you by IEEE Computer Society and IEEE Software magazine.

In this episode, Derick Schaefer, author of CLI: A Practical Guide to Creating Modern Command-Line Interfaces, talks with host Robert Blumen about command-line interfaces old and new. Starting with a short review of the origin of commands in the early unix systems, they trace the evolution of commands into modern CLIs. Following the historic rise, fall, and re-emergence of CLIs, they consider innovative examples such as git, github, WordPress, and warp. Schaefer clarifies whether commands are the same as CLIs and then discusses a range of topics, including implementation languages, packages in the golang ecosystem for CLI development, CLIs and APIs, CLIs and AIs, AI tooling versus MCP, the object-command pattern, command flags, API authentication, whether CLIs should be stateless, and output formats – json, rich text.

Brought to you by IEEE Computer Society and IEEE Software magazine.

Show Notes

Related Links

• Book: >CLI

• go pFlag package: GitHub – spf13/pflag: Drop-in replacement for Go’s flag package, implementing POSIX/GNU-style –flags.

• go Cobra package GitHub – spf13/cobra: A Commander for modern Go CLI interactions

• Derick Schaefer on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/derickschaefer/

• se-radio episode SE Radio 679: Wesley Beary on API Design

Transcript

Original source