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by doorhammer 1141 days ago
100% and I never thought of that before but I can see how you'd get that impression from tutorials.

The VSCode powershell extensions will also give you suggestion squigglies under all of your aliases in a saved script if they're not long-form, but I usually mix and match based on pragmatism.

My use of alias vs long-form usually comes down to two sort of situations:

* Ad-hoc at the shell: all aliases all the time (and make my own if I need to. welcome to my godless wasteland, population: me) * Shared scripts: Just like any code, do what's idiomatic for the team. Usually it's largely aliases with some long-form

In practice I'd say the formatting consistency situation on teams isn't nearly as bad as SQL but obviously not as good as Go.

For reference, I'm also a huge APL fan, so hit me with arcane symbols in my free-time all day long, but definitely pragmatic balance at work.

I also don't even think of them as acronyms personally. The acronym just sort of means the semantic action in my brain at this point, but I think that's mostly a fluency thing, and can't really speak to it being hurtful/helpful since I'm so removed from when I first started learning it

1 comments

Regarding not thinking of them as acronyms: yeah I get that. I was wondering how to best phrase that sentence because, indeed, curl also does not stand for C Uniform Resource Locator in my head, or grep for global regular expression perl-style (if I'm remembering that one correctly). It's just curl and grep. However, whereas curl and grep are really treated as names, spps I can currently regurgitate only by thinking of stop-process, and I imagine most such abbreviations will be like that for a while.
totally agree, and yeah, "you eventually memorize all the arcane bits" definitely isn't a point in favor of powershell

there are also some commands I use all the time that don't have built in aliases like the json converters, so that makes cross-machine alias consistency for some important things not great