[seabass-labrax]

> grep is better than find "find-regular-expression"

I'm not sure if you are familiar with where grep came from, but in short it is an abbreviation of a command in the original UNIX text editor: g/re/p - g for global command, re standing for your search query and p for print to screen or teletype. In that way, it is nothing more than an anachronism that would have been immediately obvious to anyone working in a UNIX environment at the time.

AWK and Perl are just programming languages. I think they have made up names because programming languages are singular entities, but have too many characteristics to condense into a short name. That's different from a function, which in conventional style does exactly one thing with only one or two characteristics and so can have a 'short' and descriptive name a few words long.

I don't disagree with your argument, but I wanted to point out that the examples you gave were made-up names out of tradition or necessity, not because they were intentionally designed to be memorable.

[brianpan]

Choosing the name grep because it is easily recognizable as coming from the command it is inspired by is literally "intentionally designed to be memorable".