Well then we can just add "if you have to abbreviate your function name and arguments for the common form to fit in a tweet, you're probably doing it wrong".
> "if you have to abbreviate your function name and arguments for the common form to fit in a tweet, you're probably doing it wrong".
There go all my Unix commands! (OK, that is an uncharitable interpretation—changing `mv` to `move` wouldn't overflow a tweet—but it does indicate, I think, that it's not always obvious when an abbreviation is reasonable.)
Those abbreviation decisions were made in the early 1970's. How does that indicate the non-obviousness of deciding when it is or is not appropriate to use abbreviations today?
I was writing from the point of view of someone who finds Unix abbreviations perfectly acceptable (as compared to my comically abrogated SmallTalk / Objective-C (I don't even know which) invocation above (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10990803), which I'd say is clearly not acceptable). Certainly, my argument will not be convincing to someone who doesn't share that point of view.
Unix is incredibly guilty of this. Everything would be so much easier to learn if mv was generally aliased to move and all code examples used the long version.
> Everything would be so much easier to learn if mv was generally aliased to move and all code examples used the long version.
I dunno; Tim Berners-Lee has said that his single biggest mistake was including two slashes in URLs (as in http://news.ycombinator.com, as opposed to http:/news.ycombinator.com). (I can't find any better citation for this than http://www.plughitzlive.com/theupstream/298-creator-of-the-w..., unfortunately.) I think that one shouldn't underestimate the apparently negligible impact of an extra character or two, if there will be millions of people typing those extra characters potentially many times a day, over the course of decades or centuries.
(Actually, now that I read your post more carefully, you say that `mv` should be aliased to `move`, meaning, I assume, that `mv` would also be available. I am still unsure about that, because most people would never bother to learn the short version—witness how many people don't know keyboard shortcuts for their most commonly used programmes—but I guess the experts would, and that, perhaps, is enough.)
He wasn't even saying that the // should be a single /, he was saying that the : at the end of the protocol identifier is already sufficient. He wanted something more like:
Don't listen to me—I don't know anything about good API design. (That's not sarcasm or modesty, but the simple truth.) However, if the self-diagnosed biggest mistake of Tim Berners-Lee's life was to add a single extra character to a commonly typed string, then surely one has to consider that the addition of two extra characters could eventually also be judged a mistake?
From my point of view, he wasn't saying it because it's an extra character, but because http://news.ycombinator.com is more cryptic and harder to understand than http:news.ycombinator.com.
That fits into my belief that more readable (move instead of mv) is better.
As with all metrics, that can be gamed. Would
(the same arguments, obfuscated), which comes in at a much-reduced character count of 75, be any better?