Maybe I'm dating myself, but it took reading these comments for me to figure out that "smol" is pronounced "small" and not "es em oh el". Only after that did I think to Google it and find the dictionary.com slang entry [0].
If some significant portion of the user base is as slang-ignorant as I am (for example, most who speak English as a second language!), it'd be good to support both --small and --smol for mnemonic reasons. Remembering a series of letters that have no meaning to you is much harder than remembering a word that obviously relates to what you're trying to accomplish, and if I had landed on the bun docs first I would have continued pronouncing it "es em oh el".
This has nothing to do with enterprise, it's about accessibility. For most people on the planet English isn't even the first language and now you expect them to know about obscure wannabe-cutesy internet slang? Fuck that shit, what's next? UWU.md instead of README.md?
English isn't my first or even second language. --smol creates a lot of confusion in my head. It doesn't even make any sense. Why not --less-ram or similar?
What does UWU means? Why using an artificial language instead of established one?
To me, --small gives much more information. I immediately assume that it means something is smaller than the default, memory makes immediate sense. --smol on the other hand could be an acronym or a technical word I just don't know, the likelihood of random internet slang actually being one of the first interpretations seems low for most engineers.
Let's turn this around. If the flag was called --cutesy-wootesy-fartsy, would you still argue it's approximately the same amount of information? If not, can you explicitly explain why not?
People like you make me want to code only in Brainfuck.
This sort of gatekeeping over programming culture and aesthetic is only causing the community to further splinter between people with sticks up their asses and people who just want to have fun and enjoy life.
The notion of a "bad name" is evidence of aesthetic gatekeeping.
You can sometimes say something is objectively bad: You shouldn't name your class `Car` if it models a boat. It's unrelated.
However to argue about "small" vs "smol" is a matter of pedantry. And it's further trivialized by the fact that "smol" is part of a well-established lexicon of a large demographic. Eventually you'll see it in Merriam-Webster. But if the argument is "it must be in Merriam-Webster", that's textbook gatekeeping.
If weebs are in, then I am out. Consider this my final farewell. Mods don't even ban AYAYA anymore. 40 year old men thinking they are little anime girl. Thinking they are cuties
Why not? The audience is people who are deploying JS apps. Such people likely have access to the internet and are able to google "smol" if they want to know what it means. I'm not a first language speaker of English either, the system language on my phone is not English, if I google "smol" it immediately give me the translation into my system language. It takes no time at all.
If some significant portion of the user base is as slang-ignorant as I am (for example, most who speak English as a second language!), it'd be good to support both --small and --smol for mnemonic reasons. Remembering a series of letters that have no meaning to you is much harder than remembering a word that obviously relates to what you're trying to accomplish, and if I had landed on the bun docs first I would have continued pronouncing it "es em oh el".
[0] https://www.dictionary.com/e/slang/smol/