This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Ruby Buzz by James Britt. Original Post: Generation Help Feed Title: James Britt: Ruby Development Feed URL: http://feeds.feedburner.com/JamesBritt-Home Feed Description: James Britt: Playing with better toys Latest Ruby Buzz Posts Latest Ruby Buzz Posts by James Britt Latest Posts From James Britt: Ruby Development

A small plea to people writing code generator tools.

If you have a tool that creates, say, an application skeleton, like this:

$ wooblegen appname

please do not blindly process an argument of “help”.

A few times I’ve forgotten the options to one or another tool, invoked it with an argument of ‘help’, and ended up with a boatload of directories and files, none of which were very helpful.

The correct behavior would be to scold the user (such as myself) , explaining that the standard invocation would be possibly -h or --h or -help or -H, but not, you know, help. Then give a choice to generate stuff or get help.