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Comment by mojuba | Hacker News Reader

However once you learn that sed means stream editor, you won't ever forget it. libsodium is forgettable.

> However once you learn that sed means stream editor, you won't ever forget it.

I feel like this is approximately the third time I'm learning this.

I've been using Linux for almost 20 years, including sed a lot of that time, I'm sure I've heard it before, I must have, but when parent wrote it I was like "aah, that makes sense".

Thirty years for me and several more since I learned what sed does and what it's called and never forgot.

I never forget what it does obviously, I use it at least weekly and most of the time daily. But if you asked me what "sed" stand for I'd probably not recall. I might have attempted to work in "extended" somewhere in a guess, because of ex the editor, but besides that :/

Don't forget that you need to know English for that to work. I'm pretty sure most Unix users don't speak English (most computer users definitely don't). I interact with people who know few words besides "hello" and "goodbye", and for them "sed" is a nonsense term, just a set of letters randomly thrown together. Same as e.g. Excel, a random token that means nothing.

sed is just an example, of course, the author's point doesn't hold much weight for many (most?) users globally.

lol no. There are literally a hundred plus Unix tools and commands. I couldn’t tell you what 90% of them mean. I sure as hell couldn’t have told you what sed stood for. And if you asked me tomorrow I also wouldn’t be able to tell you.

C programmers are great. I love C. I wish everything had a beautiful pure C API. But C programmers are strictly banned from naming things. Their naming privileges have been revoked, permanently.

Relevant XKCD

Https://xkcd.com/1168/

Someone once tried this on me during Friday drinks and I successfully conquered the challenge with "tar --help". The challenger tried in vain to claim that this was not valid, but everyone present agreed that an exit code of zero meant that it was a valid solution.

I seem to remember "tar xvf filename.tar" from the 1990s, I'll try that out. If I'm wrong, I'll be dead before I even notice anything. That's better than dying of cancer or Alzheimer's.

    tar zxvf

Is burnt into my brain. One of my earliest Linux command line experience required untaring zipped tars.

So yeah that xkcd is "not funny" to me in that sense. Of course I couldn't tell you pretty much any other use without a man page.

z requires it's compressed with gzip and is likely a GNU extension too (it was j for bzip2 iirc). It's also important to keep f the last because it is parametrized and a filename should follow.

So I'd always go with c (create) instead of x (extract), as the latter assumes an existing tar file (zx or xz even a gzipped tar file too; not sure if it's smart enough to autodetect compress-ed .Z files vs .gz either): with create, higher chances of survival in that xkcd.

    tar xvzf file.name

is always a valid command, whether file.name exists or not. When the file doesn't exist, tar will exit with status '2', apparently, but that has no bearing on the validity of the command.

Compare these two logs:

    $ tar xvzf read.me
    tar (child): read.me: Cannot open: No such file or directory
    tar (child): Error is not recoverable: exiting now
    tar: Child returned status 2
    tar: Error is not recoverable: exiting now

    $ tar extract read.me
    tar: invalid option -- 'e'
    Try 'tar --help' or 'tar --usage' for more information.

Do you really not understand the difference between "you told me to do something, but I can't" and "you just spouted some meaningless gibberish"?

The GGP set the benchmark at "returns exit code 0" (for "--help"), and even with XKCD, the term in use is "valid command" which can be interpreted either way.

The rest of your slight is unneccessary, but that's your choice to be nasty.

Like I said, I was operating on a lot of zipped tars. Not sure what you are replying about.

The other commenter already mentioned that the xkcd just said "valid", not return 0 (which to be fair is what the original non xkcd required so I guess fair on the mixup)

Oh, just funny mental gymnastics if we are aiming for survival in 10 seconds with a valid, exit code 0 tar command. :)

As tar is a POSIX (ISO standard for "portable operating system interfaces") utility, I am also highlighting what might get us killed as all of us are mostly used to GNU systems with all the GNU extensions (think also bash commands in scripts vs pure sh too).

No offense intended, just the hackers' chat.

Hehe fair enough in that case. Tho nothing said it had to work on a tar from like 1979 ;)

To me at least POSIX is dead. It's what Windows (before WSL) supported with its POSIX subsystem so it could say it was compatible but of course it was entirely unusable.

    Initial release July 27, 1993; 32 years ago

Like, POSIX: Take the cross section of all the most obscure UNICES out there and declare that you're a UNIX as long as you support that ;)

And yeah I use a Mac at work so a bunch of things I was used to "all my life" so to speak don't work. And they didn't work on AIX either. But that's why you install a sane toolchain (GNU ;) ).

Like sure I was actually building a memory compactification algorithm for MINIX with the vi that comes with MINIX. Which is like some super old version of it that can't do like anything you'd be used to from a VIM. It works. But it's not nice. That's like literally the one time I was using hjkl instead of arrow keys.

I still do that at least once a week. Along with "tar xzpvf" or more complex invocations like:

    tar cvf - -C /foo/bar baz | zstd > foo.tar.zstd

This works with GNU tar, but likely not with tar on other Unix systems.

"tar cf /tmp/a.tar $HOME" would, I guess, work on all POSIX systems.

  $ tar --help
  tar: unknown option -- -
  usage: tar {crtux}[014578beFfHhjLmNOoPpqsvwXZz]
             [blocking-factor | format | archive | replstr]
             [-C directory] [-I file] [file ...]
         tar {-crtux} [-014578eHhjLmNOoPpqvwXZz] [-b blocking-factor]
             [-C directory] [-F format] [-f archive] [-I file]
             [-s replstr] [file ...]
  $ echo $?
  1

That is not GNU tar's output. You might wanna make sure your installation is ok.

edit: maybe i missed the joke?

> maybe i missed the joke?

the bomb specifies only "unix" so you can't assume GNU (which, aha, is Not Unix)

Some drunks in a gnu-shaped echo chamber concluded that the world is gnu-shaped. That's not much a joke, if there is one here. Such presently popular axioms as "unix means linux" or "the userland must be gnu" or "bash is installed" can be shown as poor foundations to reason from by using a unix system that violates all those assumptions. That the XCDD comic did not define what a unix system is is another concern; there are various definitions, some of which would exclude both linux and OpenBSD.

Out of curiosity, what OS are you using?

To quote bash.org (or qdb.us?), you have to talk to tar with a German accent:

    tar xzf file.tgz

where xzf stands for "extrakt ze feil"

It's `xaf`, because the modern world is way too complex for simple Germanic rules to solve it.

But GNU tar was never the issue. It's almost completely straight forward, the only problem it has is people confusing the tar file with the target directory. If you use some UNIX tar, you will understand why everybody hates it.

creat(...)

Libsodium isn’t a tool or program the average user casually uses. Anyone who actually has to use it in their project even once will remember it.

How often do you forget what Firefox or Gnome are?

That's part of the point, I believe. It's not about being always able to guess the function from first sight. It's also about the function and name serving as mnemonic to each other once you understand how it got named.

I think perhaps the articles argument gets less strong then?

It's claimed grep is "well named" because even though it's not obvious when you first read it, that it being a contraction for "global reg ex print" and hence memorable. I'm not sure the same argument can't be made for libsodium which assuming the reader is familiar with NaCl (the same as the assumption that the previous reader is familiar with regex) then it's an equally memorable name for your crypto library.

There's always a consideration about the context the name is intended and likely to be used in. The article mentions engineering naming and "ibeam", but engineering has it's own technical names an jargon as well. Most people wont know what "4130 tube" means, but people who build bicycle frames or roll cages will - and they're likely to use the less specific term "chromoly" if the don't need to distinguish between 4130 and 4145.

In my head "libsodium" is similar - if you don't know what it (and NaCl) mean, you 100% should keep out of that part of the codebase.

Names fall on a spectrum on this argument. Sodium is not really random because of the use of "salt" on crypto. It's like saying that libsodium is part of your crypto. awk is more random.

The argument goes stronger with projects where the creator seemed to just roll the dice with the name.

Well, "Aho, Weinberger, Kernighan" is not random but entirely unrelated to it's use.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AWK

One additional complication with grep (and other CLI tools) is that the name itself is part of the day to day UX. It needs to be short, easy to say, and easy to type. With a library the API that is contained within serves the analogous role.

"libsodium" -> "salt" -> "salting is something tangentially related to cryptography" is significantly better as a mnemonic than "awk stands for the author's initials".

Same for grep - with, I guess, the proviso/assumption that you know what regular expression means, which might have been a fair assumption for the sort of people who had command line access to Unix systems in the 70s/80s, but may no longer be valid for developers under 30 who grew up with Windows and were perhaps trained in 6 or 26 week "bootcamps" that didn't have time to cover historical basics like that?

Regular expressions are more of a CS topic (regular languages), though common abbrevs of "re" and "regex" I've only seen in the wild pre and post my formal education in CS.

Yeah, I'd totally expect CS grads, old school Unix sysadmins, and Perl hackers to be fully familiar with Regex. Not so sure I'd expect that from bootcamp front end webdev "grads", self touch game devs, or maybe (I'm not sure?) engineers who have spent their careers in Microsoft dev environments.

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