So here's my theory. Whenever we have the experience of a field of useful knowledge being "bullshittery," it's because we ourselves learned it in an ad-hoc and

So here's my theory. Whenever we have the experience of a field of useful knowledge being "bullshittery," it's because we ourselves learned it in an ad-hoc and unsystematic way. There's no question that the C language, say, is complex and full of arcana, both syntactic and from the library. But most people go about learning it with the expectation that this is so. We're often accompanied by friends and guides. Learning a language we usually have the sense that there's a fairly clear beginning, middle, and (just maybe) end--or at least saturation point, where our mastery is sufficient to do useful work--to our quest. The (UNIX?) command line feels like bullshittery not, I suggest, because it's intrinsically more arcane and arbitrary than many languages and standard libraries, but because of our procedure of learning. People tend to discover it. We tend to learn each part (command, option) in response to a specific need. And this both compartmentalizes our knowledge (we know what "ls -la" does but not what "ls -a" does) and makes us quick forgetters (on the idea that what we learn for a specific purpose we tend not to retain for long). Therefore, don't blame the command line. Blame the educational process. And if you want to experience the command line without frustration--not as "bullshittery" but as simply a tool you understand and have mastered--the solution is to do what the author seems to allude to, which is to take a more systematic and deliberate approach to learning the thing.