5 ms·

Because not everyone has 20 or more years of flag memory from using Linux, and they’ve also got to maintain the scripts. If you’re not familiar with every arcan

Because not everyone has 20 or more years of flag memory from using Linux, and they’ve also got to maintain the scripts. If you’re not familiar with every arcane invocation of find or tar or whatever, or even if it’s just been a while, the long options are a godsend when you’re skimming a script trying to figure out what it’s doing.

userbinator 2y ago
Because not everyone has 20 or more years of flag memory from using Linux It's called learning, apparently something that is now being eschewed in favour of quick superficiality (and making developers more replaceable --- with AI or unskilled offshore labour.) No wonder "modern" software is almost always total shit. "But I don't have the time to learn," you complain, but ask yourself this instead: Why do you never have the time to do it right, but always the time to do it twice (or however many times is necessary to get a barely-working product)?
- 9dev 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - userbinator 2y ago
    [flagged]
    - 9dev 2y ago
      Nobody here was advocating against learning and memorising, but for writing code that is as self-evident and unambiguous as possible. Talk to any electrician which kinds of diagrams they prefer; those were a fellow was clever, trying to compress stuff as much as possible, or those that are clearly readable and easy to understand. Pilots carry heaps of documentation with them on the plane, walk through checklists instead of trying to memorise what to do. Your argument doesn’t hold up the slightest scrutiny. I’m advocating for a culture of helping people hone their skills by learning from others instead of being turned off by their arrogance. That’s a very different thing from encouraging them to avoid thinking.
- biorach 2y ago
  You're confusing learning with memorization.
  - userbinator 2y ago
    It's the lowest, easiest level of learning.
  - hackerthemonkey 2y ago
    Exactly that. Well said. I can control my learning but memory? Not as much.
- pcwalton 2y ago
  I’m nostalgic about old Unix too, but it’s just that: nostalgia. In reality, Unix was the system that brought us such elegant well-designed APIs as gets(3) and strtok(3).
- olejorgenb 2y ago
  Learning that this tool can be used do these things, manipulate these objects or stream of data like this, and that this tool is useful in combination with these other tools are the valuable part. Memorizing some arbitrary encoding of the parameters are not really useful when I can offload it to my language center in the brain and basically get that part for free...
  - skydhash 2y ago
    Why do you conflate learning with memorizing? man <command> is easy to do. And you take notes, write script, functions and alias for things you do often.
- hackerthemonkey 2y ago
  Learning is one thing and being able to comprehend a piece of code at a glance is another. I might know them but wouldn’t immediately remember all the past and future short form of flags ever written. What is even the point of that? If I am comfortable with the essence of what they do, does it really matter that much if I have that ingrained in my memory that -r does foo while -f does bar?
- JimDabell 2y ago
  I’ve got almost 30 years of using UNIX shells and I’ve learnt a lot more than most, but there are plenty of tools that have things like -r and -R that do radically different things and I don’t always remember the difference between them. If it’s written --recursive then it’s a lot clearer. Clarity is useful even when you have a lot of knowledge and experience.
- mplanchard 2y ago
  As someone who works on a team of people with different levels of experience, where understanding is more important than some self-inflicted purity test of their unix chops, I will always either do long options or, where that’s not possible, a comment explaining the short options. No one is complaining about not having time to learn: you’re arguing against a strawman. The point is not to discourage learning, it’s to encourage clarity in a context where it can at times be critically important.
tannhaeuser 2y ago
No the problem is to overload utilities with hundreds of options and subcommand languages over the course of decades. The starting point was quick command-line usage but GNU-style long options are clearly rooted in Elisp/emacs hyphenated-words-verbosity. You can tell it wasn't meant to be like this when typing somecmd -h results in multiple pages of option output where you can't see the forrest for the trees, and the command's manpage similarly loosing its usefulness due to sheer size, and frequently not even containing an EXAMPLES section. If it has a manpage in the first place, rather than linking to a nonexistant texinfo page like was practice for the longest time. All of which make you none the wiser so you go to the web for example usage.
xyzzy9563 2y ago
You can always copy+paste it into an LLM and have it explain the options in 5 seconds.
- mplanchard 2y ago
  I like how programmers are all about locality of reasoning and avoiding context switches until the context switch is “go paste it into an LLM”
  - xyzzy9563 2y ago
    Just wait 5 years when 99% of code is written by LLM agents.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
- timewizard 2y ago
  I just use the man page. Which happily describes all the options in an easily digestible format that does not require either an ineternet connection or massive amounts of power to be wasted on a result that is almost certainly copyrighted and flat out stolen from it's original creator. I am of a generation where I see these uses of LLMs as exceptionally lazy or showy. Your ready use of a "chatbot" is not an attribute to broadcast like this.

userbinator 2y ago

Because not everyone has 20 or more years of flag memory from using Linux It's called learning, apparently something that is now being eschewed in favour of quick superficiality (and making developers more replaceable --- with AI or unskilled offshore labour.) No wonder "modern" software is almost always total shit. "But I don't have the time to learn," you complain, but ask yourself this instead: Why do you never have the time to do it right, but always the time to do it twice (or however many times is necessary to get a barely-working product)?

9dev 2y ago
[flagged]
- userbinator 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - 9dev 2y ago
    Nobody here was advocating against learning and memorising, but for writing code that is as self-evident and unambiguous as possible. Talk to any electrician which kinds of diagrams they prefer; those were a fellow was clever, trying to compress stuff as much as possible, or those that are clearly readable and easy to understand. Pilots carry heaps of documentation with them on the plane, walk through checklists instead of trying to memorise what to do. Your argument doesn’t hold up the slightest scrutiny. I’m advocating for a culture of helping people hone their skills by learning from others instead of being turned off by their arrogance. That’s a very different thing from encouraging them to avoid thinking.
biorach 2y ago
You're confusing learning with memorization.
- userbinator 2y ago
  It's the lowest, easiest level of learning.
- hackerthemonkey 2y ago
  Exactly that. Well said. I can control my learning but memory? Not as much.
pcwalton 2y ago
I’m nostalgic about old Unix too, but it’s just that: nostalgia. In reality, Unix was the system that brought us such elegant well-designed APIs as gets(3) and strtok(3).
olejorgenb 2y ago
Learning that this tool can be used do these things, manipulate these objects or stream of data like this, and that this tool is useful in combination with these other tools are the valuable part. Memorizing some arbitrary encoding of the parameters are not really useful when I can offload it to my language center in the brain and basically get that part for free...
- skydhash 2y ago
  Why do you conflate learning with memorizing? man <command> is easy to do. And you take notes, write script, functions and alias for things you do often.
hackerthemonkey 2y ago
Learning is one thing and being able to comprehend a piece of code at a glance is another. I might know them but wouldn’t immediately remember all the past and future short form of flags ever written. What is even the point of that? If I am comfortable with the essence of what they do, does it really matter that much if I have that ingrained in my memory that -r does foo while -f does bar?
JimDabell 2y ago
I’ve got almost 30 years of using UNIX shells and I’ve learnt a lot more than most, but there are plenty of tools that have things like -r and -R that do radically different things and I don’t always remember the difference between them. If it’s written --recursive then it’s a lot clearer. Clarity is useful even when you have a lot of knowledge and experience.
mplanchard 2y ago
As someone who works on a team of people with different levels of experience, where understanding is more important than some self-inflicted purity test of their unix chops, I will always either do long options or, where that’s not possible, a comment explaining the short options. No one is complaining about not having time to learn: you’re arguing against a strawman. The point is not to discourage learning, it’s to encourage clarity in a context where it can at times be critically important.

tannhaeuser 2y ago

No the problem is to overload utilities with hundreds of options and subcommand languages over the course of decades. The starting point was quick command-line usage but GNU-style long options are clearly rooted in Elisp/emacs hyphenated-words-verbosity. You can tell it wasn't meant to be like this when typing somecmd -h results in multiple pages of option output where you can't see the forrest for the trees, and the command's manpage similarly loosing its usefulness due to sheer size, and frequently not even containing an EXAMPLES section. If it has a manpage in the first place, rather than linking to a nonexistant texinfo page like was practice for the longest time. All of which make you none the wiser so you go to the web for example usage.

xyzzy9563 2y ago

You can always copy+paste it into an LLM and have it explain the options in 5 seconds.

mplanchard 2y ago
I like how programmers are all about locality of reasoning and avoiding context switches until the context switch is “go paste it into an LLM”
- xyzzy9563 2y ago
  Just wait 5 years when 99% of code is written by LLM agents.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
timewizard 2y ago
I just use the man page. Which happily describes all the options in an easily digestible format that does not require either an ineternet connection or massive amounts of power to be wasted on a result that is almost certainly copyrighted and flat out stolen from it's original creator. I am of a generation where I see these uses of LLMs as exceptionally lazy or showy. Your ready use of a "chatbot" is not an attribute to broadcast like this.