Tyler Zesiger wrote:
> The obsessive levels of abbreviation in the *nix world infuriate me. 
> Especially when it's so easy to make verbose and abbreviated commands 
> exist together, and do the same thing.

Of course you understand things like 'ls', 'pwd', 'cd', '/usr/bin', and 
many other things in Unix are historical? They *did* need to abbreviate 
things as memory was very very tiny back then.

I don't think Unix/Linux developers suffers from obsessive levels of 
abbreviation right now. For example: Gnome programs are named very 
verbosely: gnome-config, gnome-terminal, etc. Also see how Redhat, 
Mandrake, Apple (OS X), etc. name their programs.

Of course, the filesystem layout will probably stay more or less the 
same (or at least evolve very very slowly) because it's just too hard to 
change paths and dirs in everything. There are efforts though, like 
Gobolinux.

But I do find that many Perl programmers' tendency to abbreviate 
everything is a little bit too much. $prog or $prg instead of $program, 
$chg instead of $change, $txt instead of $text (please, it's just one 
letter!), etc. This does infuriate me sometimes.

-- 
dave