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I think bash is terse for at least 2 reasons:

1. Quicker to type repeated variations of commands at a CLI.

2. Memorization of flags isn't as much a concern since you're at the CLI, you can often easily look up the meanings of options and flags with -h or man pages.

It may be slightly more difficult in the beginning, but once you're familiar, terseness saves significant time.

I would relate shell languages more to vim or emacs in that regards. They have a higher learning curve but pay off in efficiency in the long term.



Yeah shame of me for not mentioning the terseness is faster argument.

Do you think that terseness saves significant time as compared to just tab-completing longer flags?


It's the only benefit I suppose.

I neglected to think about tab-completion, but I see you mentioned it at the end. I've never used it for bash. It really depends on whether I can guess or remember the first letter(s) to the option. If it's a command I am new to, I'd still need to print out the available options anyways.




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