No doubt that you can trace the history to explain it. But is there an inherent allure of the eventual design that steered these decisions toward a result like

No doubt that you can trace the history to explain it. But is there an inherent allure of the eventual design that steered these decisions toward a result like this? The article gives a very compelling theory as to why it might. If the effect of "inherent allure" sounds improbable, ask yourself if it might explain why common keyboard commands are nice comfortable ones to type, like ls and dir - and you never find yourself typing qza or xwz. All have good historical reasons, like not many operations starting with Z, but I think if there really was a common "Query Zeta Array" operation, it's likely it would have been renamed or there would be a tool with an easier-to-type name that would wrap it.