> For example, would you prefer a “find” command that uses environment variables instead of command line options?

I use 'find' so much that my muscle memory would hurt if it changed, but it's actually a really interesting example. Its use of arguments to build a domain-specific language is a cool hack, but pretty horrendous; e.g.

    find . -type f -a -not \( -name \*.htm -o -name \*.html \)

We can compare this to tools like 'jq', which use a DSL but keep it inside a single string argument:

    key=foo val=bar jq -n '{(env.key): env.val}'

Note that 'jq' also accepts key/value pairs via commandline arguments, but that requires triplets of arguments, e.g.

    jq -n --arg key foo --arg val bar '{(env.key): env.val}'