LePichu

CLIs as Blueprints and Evolution of CLI Frameworks

30th September 2023

10.2 Minutes

LePichu

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So you might be wondering after reading the title, "Pichu, what cursed shit are you up to now?" and you'd be right in questioning that. Today we will look at CLI Frameworks and the styles they used over the years, and maybe a bit of personal history and how CLIs evolved with computers, maybe even how the terminal did, but yeah, let's go!

The Tale of this Toddler

A Bit of personal history, I was 3/4 when I first got access to a computer, and naturally being a curious toddler did play around a lot, one thing that fascinated was cmd.exe, the time I first launched it was around 5-6, I didn't know what it what, it seemed like a virus at times, other times black magic, I never really knew what it was for until years later when I started programming. When I was 11, I picked up Java, and arguably that is where my life when down hill but we will continue, I learned how to invoke Java and other things via command line after using Eclipse, I'd go to school, out-teach my computers teacher when it came to Java, yet I still didn't know how the console worked. I would soon drop Java for a year until I turned 13, where I'd pick up JavaScript specifically Node.js and start programming properly again, and around the same time picked up Minecraft Modding up for both editions of the Game, and it was partly in reason to help me mod Bedrock Edition which made me pick up Node.js and the Terminal again.

This is the part I go down the Terminal lifestyle, from my laptop to my phone, from Batch to PowerShell to B*sh and then back to PowerShell. This is where the descent to madness began, the story of how every system I have runs PowerShell. You might be imagining me either a fat-neckbeard Linux user right now, or maybe a professional tomboy systems administrator, you'd be justified in those assumptions but unfortunately, I am not the sysadmin, at least I am not the Linux user either. But may be we are getting a bit off-the-rails, back to the original discussion, should we?

Vanguard

Imagine this, this is the 1940s and the Nazi Germany just become real and they are using computers connected via terminals to do a lot of shit you'd expect a fucking fascist state with the idea of racial domination to co-ordinate shit with. But why am I telling you this? Well, there is no point really but something else happened that year too, the first Complex-Number Calculator was showcased at Dartmouth College, but that isn't the detail I want to tell you about, the thing is that this was showcased by calculating shit on a remote calculator sitting in New York over telephone wires via a teletype terminal, this is one of the first examples of remote computing in the history of computing and if you think about is, modern day SSH is quite literally, the same shit in essence.

But why specifically this? Why trace back to this?