Comment by nauticacom

The last point would be amazing, imo. It's unfortunate that, because of history, commands accept and parse arbitrary strings as input instead of formally specifying it like a function signature + docblock. If I could rewrite the universe, commands would use a central API for specifying the names, data types, descriptions, etc. for all the input they take. In our timeline, maybe some file format could be standardized that describes the particular inputs and options a command takes, and e.g. shells would hook into it. Kind of like header files, but distributed either in a community repository or by each of the tools themselves.