this post was submitted on 27 Mar 2025
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    Almost as annoying as the windows evangelists (lemmy.world)
    submitted 1 week ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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    [–] [email protected] 26 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (16 children)

    Having started out in programming before the GUI era, typing commands just feels good to me. But tbh Linux commands really are ridiculously cryptic - and needlessly so. In the 1980s and 90s there was a great OS called VMS whose commands and options were all English words (I don't know if it was localized). It was amazingly intuitive. For example, to print 3 copies of a file in landscape orientation the command would be PRINT /COPIES=3 /ORIENTATION=LANDSCAPE. And you could abbreviate anything any way you wanted as long as it was still unambiguous. So PRI /COP=3 /OR=LAND would work, and if you really hated typing you could probably get away with PR /C=3 /O=L. And it wasn't even case-sensitive, I'm just using uppercase for illustration.

    The point is, there's no reason to make everybody remember some programmer's individual decision about how to abbreviate something - "chmod o+rwx" could have been "setmode /other=read,write,execute" or something equally easy for newbies. The original developers of Unix and its descendants just thought the way they thought. Terseness was partly just computer culture of that era. Since computers were small with tight resources, filenames on many systems were limited to 8 characters with 3-char extension. This was still true even for DOS. Variables in older languages were often single characters or a letter + digit. As late as 1991 I remember having to debug an ancient accounting program whose variables were all like A1, A2, B5... with no comments. It was a freaking nightmare.

    Anyway, I'm just saying the crypticness is largely cultural and unnecessary. If there is some kind of CLI "skin" that lets you interact with Linux at the command line using normal words, I'd love to know about it.

    [–] [email protected] 1 points 6 days ago (1 children)

    And you could abbreviate anything any way you wanted as long as it was still unambiguous.

    Oh that reminds me of diskpart on Windows. I always liked the fact that I could abbreviate "assign" to "ass".

    [–] [email protected] 2 points 6 days ago (1 children)

    Sadly, Windows and "ass" are increasingly easy to associate.

    [–] [email protected] 1 points 5 days ago

    That's true

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