> One reason it's so popular: even though it skips the actual curly brackets (thus making itself more accessible), it doesn't stray too far from the general syntactic paradigm of "curly-bracket languages'" - even though I've also seen people being alienated by the idea of "significant whitespace", again for no other reason but that it "seems wrong" to them.

All you're describing there is structured programming languages. Of course people like structured languages, that's why nearly every single programming language developed in the last 40 years (that isn't designed to interface directly with hardware) is structured. Even languages of entirely different paradigms such as Common Lisp, LOGO, Prolog, MATLAB and Forth all support structured control flows. Even BASIC - for all it's warts - supported structured logic (even if many implementations lacked proper functions).

So you're not making a convincing argument about curly braces now you've redefined the argument as structured control flows.

> No, just much better suited than people give it credit for. And this ecosystem brings new things to the table, too.

Maybe. My personal opinion is the unmanageable nest of unvetted dependencies makes it a worse solution than people give it credit for. As a pure dev tool for personal use, go for it. But I don't want to read 10k+ lines of code in the dependencies of a tool that's ostensibly just an interactive alias.

I get the whole "standing on the shoulders of giants" thing but it's gotten out of hand with node. Half the time even people writing code in node don't know what dependencies their dependencies are pulling in. All that trust placed in an ecosystem that is very easy to abuse (and has been abused too). So no thanks, I don't think that's the right tool for serious CLI work which often needs to be run on trusted machines.

> Being able to build a CLI at all? I guess, sure. Being able to quickly build an accessible CLI? Hardly so.

Actually yes. I've been writing software for 30 year in well over a dozen different languages. Much, not all but a reasonable amount of that, was writing software for servers.

> Everything in the area of HCI is in flux

Not in terms of the CLI. We're using the same standards that were defined in the 60s. If anything, the problem with the CLI is that it's engineered around design principles which are no longer relevant to modern terminals. For example:

* we no longer need to inline formatting with escape sequences - we have better markups for that.
* ASCII is no longer relevant in our international community with different writing languages and character sets.
* Terminals are no longer teletypes - there's no reason why we shouldn't be able to inline multimedia content
* Terminals are no longer teletypes - we shouldn't need to be defining TTYs/PTYs as an OS abstraction
* Defining TTYs is OS specific and a fucking mess on even some of the better designed UNIXes
* Capturing and sending signals can often be OS specific and a fucking mess to work with on even some of the better designed UNIXes
* Not all OSs even support the same suite of signals
* Signal hotkeys can't even be redefined - which means you can't always compensate for one OS missing a signal that another might have. The best you can do is enable or disable the capture of that hotkey on the TTY. Which again requires OS specific syscalls
* POSIX pipes are just byte streams. Which makes working with structured data a fucking nightmare (hence why Powershell, jq and murex all exist)
* stderr is a lousy way of capturing errors
* in fact error handling on the whole is just terrible on POSIX shells (hence why murex exists)
* POSIX shells don't support any kind of unit testing (again, hence why murex exists)
* exit numbers are a half arsed solution
* named pipes are a file system kludge
* TTY modes can get broken if a fork()ed process changes the mode and crashes for forgets to reset it on exit. Meaning your shell then becomes non-functional without manually fork()ing `reset`
* ANSI escape sequences are anything but standardised. With different terminal emulators often doing significantly different things

This is all just off the top of my head so I could likely think of more if I spent any time thinking about it. All of those problems are a result of the command line interface being largely the exact same design as it was in the 60s.

So no, the CLI definitely is not in a state of flux. The exact opposite of that in fact.

More likely is the Javascript libraries you're using for CLI work is in a constant state of flux. This was a problem I had when I used to write software in node and it's one of many personal reasons I decided against using it for anything I really cared about.

> Which is why you've got to take into account opportunity cost, choice paralysis, etc. All of the options out there are positively fascinating, but if I have the options to solve problems in multiple contexts with the same familiar tool, I tend to usually go for it.

That makes no sense. Last week you were saying it couldn't be done and now you're saying the problem is too much choice. Make your mind up.

> [ksh93, yash, zsh and murex] None of which are POSIX, or common defaults?

You didn't say "POSIX shells", you said "shell scripting languages"

Also node isn't a common default either.

> [Perl] Again, not really a shell. Though I wouldn't be surprised if anyone's using it as one.

Again you didn't say "POSIX shells", you said "shell scripting languages". You can very much use Perl as a shell scripting language (and that is in fact still a common use case for it).

> Even though these tools have a good reason to be like this, having to _research_ how to _call out to an external executable_ to do something as trivial as floating point division (in the sense of "cmon man I can do this in my head, why does is it have to be so hard to tell a computer to do it") is hardly on anyone's list of priorities.

Actually computers can't do proper floating point arithmetic (in the sense that humans do) either. That's why a lot of languages (and spreadsheets too) demonstrate seemingly broken logic when comparing floating point numbers.

> Admittedly, that was a pretty bullshit argument. Not any less nuanced than "[l]ine counts mean jack shit", either - I take it as a general rule that one would prefer to write less code.

Line counts literally do mean jack shit. There are plenty of examples of where more lines equal better code. As a developer you should already know this.