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Comment by c0balt | Hacker News Reader

> The UI/UX is perfect

While I like curl, this is highly subjective, some people just prefer a GUI that can guide you and/or be visually explored.

This whole piece also reads like someone is quite angry at people preferring a different workflow than them. Some aspects, like shell history, are also not the magic bullet they propose here as it doesn't, e. G., cover the actual responses.

Curl's ability to do almost everything is a minor curse here too as it means that any documentation (man pages, options help) is very large.

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Just fyi: the writing style is a meme. I think it's following the "just use html"[0] format (though, that may be its own riff on the meme).

Not to detract from you point; just to say that the author is probably not as angry as this could make them seem.

[0] https://justfuckingusehtml.com/

Thanks! I didn't know this gem, definitely saving it.

Thank you for that pointer/explanation. That does make the choice of words understandable to some extent even if it feels a bit excessive.

Not to mention saving headers, tokens, doing multiple requests using the results from the previous, etc.

This guy would say "just use bash" and ignore the average user experience.

You can do all that in a shell script though

That’s mostly what I do when I need to interact with an API:

  _plz() {
    curl [rest of common args]
  }

Then:

  _plz GET endpoint

Of course you can, but shell scripting really fucking sucks.

One moment you have a properly quoted JSON string, the next moment you have a list of arguments, oops you need to escape the value for this program to interpret it right, but another program needs it to be double-escaped, is that \, \\, or \\\\? What subset of shell scripting are we doing? Fish? modern Linux bash, macOS-compatible bash? The lowest common denominator? My head is spinning already!

If I want to script something I'm writing Python these days. I've lost too much sleep over all the "interesting" WTF situations you get yourself into with shell scripting. I've never used Hurl but it's been on my radar and I think that's probably the sweet spot for tasks like this.

Ok agreed. But you can also just use any scripting language of your choice. Now you have a completely open development platform for your APIs.

I guess parsing cmd line outputs would be annoying. Would be a worth while library to write

> This whole piece also reads like someone is quite angry at people

It’s a meme that originated with https://thebestmotherfucking.website/ or one like it.

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