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311 points todsacerdoti | 2 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
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plorkyeran ◴[] No.46237424[source]
> grep (global regular expression print), awk (Aho, Weinberger, Kernighan; the creators’ initials), sed (stream editor), cat (concatenate), diff (difference). Even when abbreviated, these names were either functional descriptions or systematic derivations.

If you asked someone unfamiliar with unix tools what they thought each of these commands did, diff is the only one which they would have even the slightest chance of guessing. It's ridiculous to complain about "libsodium" and then hold up "awk" as a good name.

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mojuba ◴[] No.46237555[source]
However once you learn that sed means stream editor, you won't ever forget it. libsodium is forgettable.
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bigiain ◴[] No.46237672[source]
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?
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1. necovek ◴[] No.46240177[source]
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.
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2. bigiain ◴[] No.46240880[source]
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.