Linked by Amjith Ramanujam on Mon 15th Dec 2008 21:48 UTC
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Member since:
2007-08-17
Zenja, it comes back to the old story of 'easy to use at first' vs 'easy to use'. Sure long verbose names might help new users to get to grips with the system, but would you really want to be forced to use them everyday. Personally I would rather invest a little mental effort into remembering the short mnemonic directory and command names - you don't even need to know what they mean just what they are likely to contain.
Sure keystrokes may come cheap now that we aren't using teletypes and and have shell completion, however that isn't the only benefit of short mnemonic names. What about screen space and readability (i.e. being able to quickly read the screen). Take the following that I might use on my SUSE webserver (using Plesk):
/srv/www/vhosts/domain.name/conf/vhost.conf
Now compare it a with a more verbose equivalent:
/Server_Files/Web_Server/Virtual_Hosts/domain.name/Configuration_Files /Plesk_Virtual_Host_Apache_Configuration_Override_File
Sure the second one is more descriptive, however it isn't a great deal more meaningful. The amount of time it will take you to read and comprehend is much greater (IMHO). Also if you are on a small terminal, every command you type will be spread across several lines.