4 ms·
> 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 sai
by 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/