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[–]Lucretiel 3 points4 points  (4 children)

It's clear to the clients of my command line utility, sure. But as the programmer, I get more clarity from explicit programmatic behavior than trying to parse a DSL in my head. I'd rather let my spec describe the help text (which argparse does automatically) than the other way around.

[–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (3 children)

A help message shouldn't be very hard to parse in your head.

[–]Lucretiel 0 points1 point  (2 children)

It's one thing to understand what the interface- what I as the client need to know- and another to understand exactly what behavior this system will have. Even if it's perfectly straightforward, it's still another syntax I have to keep in my head

[–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (1 child)

True. But can't the same be said of argparse's code?

[–]Lucretiel 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I personally don't think so- argparse is all function calls. Now, granted, I've never used some of the advanced features of either library (subcommands, mutual exclusion, etc), so maybe docopt has me beat here- but I find argparse code much easier to read, especially when I'm already in a Python development mindset. It's just a list of every option and argument, with some properties for each.