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When you know that some default directories in Unix are result of one of the authors running out of disk space, and then religiously followed by everyone, findi

by bitL 9y ago

When you know that some default directories in Unix are result of one of the authors running out of disk space, and then religiously followed by everyone, finding countless arguments why is it the right way, how could you take it truly seriously? Or bad quality of keyboards in the past forcing use of super short commands/directory names?

dagenleg 9y ago
What's wrong with short commands? Not all of us enjoy overly verbose powershell-style syntax.
- bitL 9y ago
  Nothing wrong. Just the reason for them might have been some "wobbly wooden keyboard" difficult to use rather than intentional shortness.
  - FRex 9y ago
    Just because they were optimizing for length doesn't mean they threw mnemonic potential out the window. And either way it's quite arbitrary because almost all command names are still based on English that is a second language to many (including yours truly, but I'm not complaining, I find the usual unix shortcuts rather nice and intuitive most of the time and most of all - extremely quick to write, PowerShell makes me shudder and I had such big hopes for it). Many concepts are also unique to unix/computers/low-level usage so any name will be non-intuitive. If you never encountered the concept of mounting a filesystem and don't know what an inode is then 'list inodes too' and 'list mounted filesystems' are no better to you than 'ls -i' and 'df'. And someone who knows will prefer the latter, because it's that much quicker to type and harder to mistype.
FRex 9y ago
Typing commands was originally limited by the speed of a teleprinter (before screens became standard), not the quality of the keyboard (QWERTY keyboard was created to slow down typists that were so fast they broke typing machines so I'd assume that it already limited typing speed enough). This is also likely where the prompt character comes from, today we can do without it because terminal emulators remember the input and execute it once the current command is done but back then it actually prompted you to start typing. Teleprinters is also where the word 'tty' (there are tty and tty with numbers in /dev that represent virtual terminals and you can play with them a bit if you know how) came from. Hidden files starting with a dot was also a quirk of the ls reimplementation at the time of making filesystem hierarchical that was supposed to hide . and .. (current and parent dirs) but the check it did was for the first character being a dot, thus the concept of 'hidden files' was born. See: https://plus.google.com/+RobPikeTheHuman/posts/R58WgWwN9jp https://plus.google.com/+RobPikeTheHuman/posts/R58WgWwN9jp

by bitL 9y ago

dagenleg 9y ago

What's wrong with short commands? Not all of us enjoy overly verbose powershell-style syntax.

bitL 9y ago
Nothing wrong. Just the reason for them might have been some "wobbly wooden keyboard" difficult to use rather than intentional shortness.
- FRex 9y ago
  Just because they were optimizing for length doesn't mean they threw mnemonic potential out the window. And either way it's quite arbitrary because almost all command names are still based on English that is a second language to many (including yours truly, but I'm not complaining, I find the usual unix shortcuts rather nice and intuitive most of the time and most of all - extremely quick to write, PowerShell makes me shudder and I had such big hopes for it). Many concepts are also unique to unix/computers/low-level usage so any name will be non-intuitive. If you never encountered the concept of mounting a filesystem and don't know what an inode is then 'list inodes too' and 'list mounted filesystems' are no better to you than 'ls -i' and 'df'. And someone who knows will prefer the latter, because it's that much quicker to type and harder to mistype.

FRex 9y ago

Typing commands was originally limited by the speed of a teleprinter (before screens became standard), not the quality of the keyboard (QWERTY keyboard was created to slow down typists that were so fast they broke typing machines so I'd assume that it already limited typing speed enough). This is also likely where the prompt character comes from, today we can do without it because terminal emulators remember the input and execute it once the current command is done but back then it actually prompted you to start typing. Teleprinters is also where the word 'tty' (there are tty and tty with numbers in /dev that represent virtual terminals and you can play with them a bit if you know how) came from. Hidden files starting with a dot was also a quirk of the ls reimplementation at the time of making filesystem hierarchical that was supposed to hide . and .. (current and parent dirs) but the check it did was for the first character being a dot, thus the concept of 'hidden files' was born. See: https://plus.google.com/+RobPikeTheHuman/posts/R58WgWwN9jp https://plus.google.com/+RobPikeTheHuman/posts/R58WgWwN9jp