3 ms·

Why not just "man grep | grep -- --fixed-strings" real quick?

• kazinator 6y ago
  These real quick moments add up to wasted time real quick.
  • khalilravanna 6y ago
    Wasted time for someone who has all of these memorized. How about all the future wasted time of people having to look up the flags cause they’re not explicitly spelled out? I’m in favor of explicitness because it saves time for future people and gatekeeps less.
    • kazinator 6y ago
      -F is explicitly spelled out. Proof: I can see it. Explicit is the opposite of implicit, and implicit doesn't mean "abbreviated to a single character that is plainly visible". You don't necessarily know what a long option means without looking it up, just because it is long. Firstly, if your native language isn't English, you may have to look it up in a dictionary. The ordinary meanings you find there may not reveal what that word means in the context of the program. So, at that point you're off to the documentation anyway. I know what "hard" and "soft" are. Therefore, is it obvious what "git reset --soft" means? Hardly. Once you know what it means, "--soft" jogs your memory by association a lot better than some "-X". So that would seem like it is less cognitive work. But when we have long options, it encourages the option vocabulary of a program to keep growing, which adds to the cognitive load.