<story><title>Owl: A toolkit for writing command-line user interfaces in Elixir</title><url>https://hexdocs.pm/owl/readme.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>vegabook</author><text>An oblique thing I love about the Elixir ecosystem is that there is a strong focus on visual and aesthetic attention to detail. I mean look at those multibars in the asciinema. They&amp;#x27;re gorgeous for a console. In this, I&amp;#x27;m reminded of R vs Python, where the former simply has far better graphics capabilities than the latter. In the Elixir case, I can&amp;#x27;t help but compare the look and feel of Livebooks compared with Jupyter Notebooks. The former are miles ahead in terms of a modern visual experience. It&amp;#x27;s very pleasant especially if you&amp;#x27;re expected to have an audience for your output, which kind of contrasts with python which always feels like it&amp;#x27;s built for engineers (and there&amp;#x27;s nothing wrong with that, but it is a different culture).</text></comment>
<story><title>Owl: A toolkit for writing command-line user interfaces in Elixir</title><url>https://hexdocs.pm/owl/readme.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>vlad</author><text>Building a cross-platform CLI from a python script in 2009 required unrelated open-source tools to package for each of the three major operating systems. I remember asking Dropbox guys what they were using. Having an official way to do it is much better.&lt;p&gt;Regardless of technology, I think CLI&amp;#x27;s tend to maintain their original size, or get smaller over time. If you choose to use a CLI built with Elixir, I imagine it could gain a web-based GUI without a large increase, if each build already includes a runtime environment and system libraries. Or if a CLI is written in another language and advertised as very compact, I imagine its size will also stay consistent, but might not gain the same fancy features. And in any case, popular compilers or packaging tools tend gain optimization improvements over time.</text></comment>