The 'unfriendliness' doesn't come from the names, it's that for it to make sense you have to absorb some conceptual framework of how the thing works. People ada

The 'unfriendliness' doesn't come from the names, it's that for it to make sense you have to absorb some conceptual framework of how the thing works. People adapt to odd names quite easily, just as you have, once they get used to them - both syntactically (ls doesn't actually stand for 'list') and semantically (find doesn't really find, maybe 'ftraverse' for filtered traverse). To use the unix command line you have to get your head around a bunch of key concepts, say, globbing, i/o redirection, pipes, etc. After that, whether it's 'grep' or 'brian' isn't going to get in your way much. This sort of jargon is pretty typical, though, and I think it's a fairly small barrier. Want to learn some LISPy language? Here come the entirely meaningless car, cdr, cons, s-expression. Functional processing of sequences? Well you can map, you can reduce, you can zip, you can fold. Building your first RoR app? Don't forget to railtie your merb to the phusion gem of the sinatra rack, but not before you've raked your capistrano with a cucumber. You can probably safely rename every JS framework to an MMM (Marklar, Marklar, Marklar) framework given the liberties they take with the meaning of the things M, V and C stand for. You can give, say, 'cat' or 'tee' magically and perfectly clear names but than in itself won't make anyone understand things like 'unix utilities have one input and two output streams' any better.