That may be the case sometimes, but not always. Here are some examples of what I think were good uses of messiness: ls output can be sorted in all sorts of wa

That may be the case sometimes, but not always. Here are some examples of what I think were good uses of messiness: ls output can be sorted in all sorts of ways with just a few characters of typing, even though it would be cleaner to make people use sort. grep has a flag for counting lines that match, even though wc is supposed to be used for counting lines. rm can remove directories with the right flags, even though rmdir is supposed to be the tool for removing directories. I think those were all net wins for the user, both in the short term and the long term.