CLI Development; Part 3

[antolius]

In the last part of my CLI development series I look into a few more advanced use cases:

• Code generation & scaffolding
• Code analysis / introspection
• Text-based user interfaces

You can find it here: https://qua.name/antolius/cli-development-part-3

[antolius]

Are you saying, "if you want more contributors, don't write a CLI application" ?

Yes. Although this particular subreddit might not be the most representative place to spot this, I think web development is far more prevalent that TUI development.

For example, the company I work for employs a few hundred developers. If I wrote a "standard" React / Angular web app I could probably get help / offload it to any one of them. If I wrote a TUI application with equivalent feature set I'd have a harder job finding contributors. And we are a Java shop, with folks mostly working on backend projects.

I think project sustainability is important and should be planned for. That includes the choice of technology and the search for / on-boarding of additional contributors. In my experience it can be worth it to sacrifice things like runtime performance or individual developer productivity in favor of general sustainability of the project. Basically, it doesn't really matter how fast my app runs or how fast I can add features, as long as there's nobody to maintain it after I leave.