<story><title>GNU Parallel 2018</title><url>https://zenodo.org/record/1146014</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tbrock</author><text>It’s a shame that this tool is so incredibly useful but simultaneously so unergonomic to use that it requires a 12 page manual.&lt;p&gt;Every time I reach for it the magical incantations that finally get it working properly are so completely unmemorable that it’s begging to have a modern replacement (like httpie is to curl).&lt;p&gt;If someone wrote a version with a better interface it would be instantly adopted in preference to this. Might be a good weekend project.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>faitswulff</author><text>&amp;gt; ..a 12 page manual.&lt;p&gt;My first thought was, &amp;quot;12 pages isn&amp;#x27;t so bad.&amp;quot; Then I loaded the page and realized you had a typo and meant _112_ page manual.&lt;p&gt;That is enough to scare me off of trying to use parallel for casual tasks.</text></comment>
<story><title>GNU Parallel 2018</title><url>https://zenodo.org/record/1146014</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tbrock</author><text>It’s a shame that this tool is so incredibly useful but simultaneously so unergonomic to use that it requires a 12 page manual.&lt;p&gt;Every time I reach for it the magical incantations that finally get it working properly are so completely unmemorable that it’s begging to have a modern replacement (like httpie is to curl).&lt;p&gt;If someone wrote a version with a better interface it would be instantly adopted in preference to this. Might be a good weekend project.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jarfil</author><text>The biggest problem with parallel is not the implementation but the command line options specification. The shell has no generic way of defining multiple streams feeding multiple placeholders, so parallel ends up using its own syntax which has to be different in order not to interfere with the base shell syntax. If the same functionality was integrated directly into the shell, it could be less complicated and more generic.</text></comment>