4 ms·
Unix is incredibly guilty of this. Everything would be so much easier to learn if mv was generally aliased to move and all code examples used the long version.
by stepanhruda 11y ago
Unix is incredibly guilty of this. Everything would be so much easier to learn if mv was generally aliased to move and all code examples used the long version.
- JadeNB 11y ago> Everything would be so much easier to learn if mv was generally aliased to move and all code examples used the long version. I dunno; Tim Berners-Lee has said that his single biggest mistake was including two slashes in URLs (as in http://news.ycombinator.com http://news.ycombinator.com, as opposed to http:/news.ycombinator.com). (I can't find any better citation for this than http://www.plughitzlive.com/theupstream/298-creator-of-the-world-wide-web-apologizes-for-extra-slash.html http://www.plughitzlive.com/theupstream/298-creator-of-the-w..., unfortunately.) I think that one shouldn't underestimate the apparently negligible impact of an extra character or two, if there will be millions of people typing those extra characters potentially many times a day, over the course of decades or centuries. (Actually, now that I read your post more carefully, you say that `mv` should be aliased to `move`, meaning, I assume, that `mv` would also be available. I am still unsure about that, because most people would never bother to learn the short version—witness how many people don't know keyboard shortcuts for their most commonly used programmes—but I guess the experts would, and that, perhaps, is enough.)
- oldmanjay 11y agoI'm totally onboard with saving two keystrokes. I don't have all second to move this file.
- JadeNB 11y agoDon't listen to me—I don't know anything about good API design. (That's not sarcasm or modesty, but the simple truth.) However, if the self-diagnosed biggest mistake of Tim Berners-Lee's life was to add a single extra character to a commonly typed string, then surely one has to consider that the addition of two extra characters could eventually also be judged a mistake?
- stepanhruda 11y agoFrom my point of view, he wasn't saying it because it's an extra character, but because http://news.ycombinator.com http://news.ycombinator.com is more cryptic and harder to understand than http:news.ycombinator.com. That fits into my belief that more readable (move instead of mv) is better.
- drostie 11y agoIt wasn't too hard to track down the quote; it is: http://library.fora.tv/2009/10/08/Next_Decade_Technologies_Changing_the_World-Tim-Berners-Lee http://library.fora.tv/2009/10/08/Next_Decade_Technologies_C... He wasn't even saying that the // should be a single /, he was saying that the : at the end of the protocol identifier is already sufficient. He wanted something more like: http:news.ycombinator.com/