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So now in order to transmit the mnemonic you have to communicate the lineage of the command. "more" begat "less" begat "zless"... Punny names stop being funny

• LeoPanthera 6y ago
  I think it's important to remember that unix-based operating systems are under your control. You can create aliases under any name you like, if you'd prefer a different name.
  • reificator 6y ago
    > unix-based operating systems are under your control Except when they're not.
    • boogies 6y ago
      True, but if you can run any command, you can probably run the alias command. It's just more convenient if you can run it from a .bashrc or similar.
• acheron 6y ago
  But it also doesn't matter. I still think of "nano" as "like pico", but I would bet at this point fewer than 10% of the people using nano today ever used pico or maybe ever heard of it. They just know the editor is named "nano" for whatever reason. "elm" (ELectronic Mail) begat "pine" begat "pico" (PIne COmposer) begat "nano".
• dTal 6y ago
  This isn't a problem unique to software. Half the stuff in the sciences is not named something useful and descriptive, but rather after whoever discovered it second. Naming things is hard. "One of the miseries of life is that everybody names things a little bit wrong, and so it makes everything a little harder to understand in the world than it would be if it were named differently." --Richard Feynman