
Meaningful short names - zdw
http://www.tedunangst.com/flak/post/shrt-nms-fr-clrty
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random_comment
I take the opposite view.

"ln" isn't "link". It's ln. My brain has particular concepts bound onto the
command 'ln', which are not the same as the concepts for 'link' in general
use.

"grep" comes for Global search, for a Regular Expression, and Print it. Grep
doesn't 'find'. It PRINTS occurrences of a regular expression (not just a
string), and continues globally rather than stopping at the first occurrence.

Another advantage is precision. "I did ln -s" is more precise than "I linked
the file". "I grepped the file" is more precise about what I did than "I found
the file" or "I searched the file".

Re-using English words directly - which already have rather broad and fuzzy
semantics - in a domain that is a) more precisely defined than English b) not
always consistent with the English meaning and c) international is not a good
idea imho.

Heck, even ln/cp/grep etc are already ambiguous enough as it is! Depending on
platform, UNIX commands may involve subtly different semantics (e.g. due to
things like HFS+ filesystem data fork vs ext3 vs ZFS copy-on-write). Or
different grammar. Quick example: cp dirname -rf works in linux, but not in
BSD since you need to place options first in BSD.

Having picked up bits of some foreign languages, I've also found that my brain
learns the correct meanings of words most easily when they are similar but not
the same as English.

When the words are the same in two languages, my brain keeps its binding to
the English meaning, and I tend to not to remember the subtleties of using it
in the foreign sense.

When the words are completely different, I sometimes struggle to remember the
new word. [I sometimes cheat and pretend I'm learning a new word of English.
Somehow, that helps]

When the word is very similar but subtly different (for example, Geomatikk in
Norwegian vs Geomatics in English, it's a) easy to remember the word and b)
easy to remember any subtle differences in meaning.

So I believe the unix way is the right way.

