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Comment by userbinator | Hacker News Reader

Strongly, strongly disagree. This is a GNU-ism, and needlessly verbose. What's with people refusing to use the vast amount of memory in their brains and actually learning, instead lazily going for the lowest-common-denominator approach relying on "loanwords" from English?

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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.

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.

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

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”

Just wait 5 years when 99% of code is written by LLM agents.

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.

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)?

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.

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.

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...

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.

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).

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?

You're confusing learning with memorization.

Exactly that. Well said. I can control my learning but memory? Not as much.

It's the lowest, easiest level of learning.

Programs are read more often than they're written, and on a scale of decades all programmers are novices. So I try to optimize my code to be obvious to novices

What's wrong with GNU? they automatically wrong or something?

So I try to optimize my code to be obvious to novices

That's the attitude which is responsible for making software the way it is today: mediocre.

Software is mediocre today? You should have seen it back in the day. It was a brittle, arcane mess.

Software isn't as exciting any more, but that excitement isn't gone because newbs don't have to look up what -O stands for anymore. It's because it's wildly more reliable.

I low key agree on this, because I think it doesn’t matter and you have to look up the meaning anyway. English-like options may make you think you already know the details but usually you don’t. If there’s a need to develop in sh/bash/etc, then a modern solution would be to make something like a language server for it which could “go to definition” right into a man page section, or combine docs for all used options in a single popup/aux window. Of course it’s not possible for every man page, since some of these are written in too free form. Iow, it’s shell, whatever you program here in more than two lines you’d better program in python instead (and I’m saying this as a low key python hater).

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