CAR and CDR (en.wikipedia.org)

I thought that for a bit until I realised tail is a bit ambiguous as it's used in the Unix space to mean the "last n" items and in some data structures as the last item pointer.

I'm a fan first/rest because of Mathematica. It has four functions that all end in "st", which means I can always recall the one I need:

First, Rest, Most, Last

(Results on Range[4], respectively: 1, {2, 3, 4}, {1, 2, 3}, 4.)

  >> a: [1 2 3 4]
  == [1 2 3 4]

  >> first a
  == 1

  >> last a
  == 4

  >> rest: func [s] [next s] 
  >> most: func [s] [copy/part s back tail s]

  >> rest a
  == [2 3 4]

  >> most a                                  
  == [1 2 3]

Yes but every structure that a cons represents can be expressed in terms of first and rest. That includes tables, singly linked lists, doubly linked lists, binary trees from experience.

Car and Cdr are arbitrary and legacy terms.

Yes but macros like caaaaaar and caaadr aren't :)

I'd rather salt my eyeballs.

I once wrote an in-place quicksort in common lisp where I kept pointers to locations of interest in the list as halves of a cons cell. Was kind of fun coming across it later and figuring out what it did. That cons cell made no semantic sense as a linked list; it was just a pair of pointers.

I just hard-wired into my brain they are car and cdr (I read it as "cadar," with both a's quite like the a in car, Spanish a for me.) In a cons list, you have the car (first) and then the cadar. Think it enough times and it sinks eventually.

What's wrong with an ordinal sort? car sorts before cdr.

*nix commands are optimized for minimizing keystrokes, too.

Would you like to type out 2-3x more characters per command?

I don't mind that much unix commands, in general (with their names, not with their usage, I hate using grep and find.)

I hate chmod, too, because I can't remember exactly what permissions are what (number-wise.) My fault, not his. But I'd love it to be named "grant" and have a neater language. Like grant user/group/whatever read,write,execute (rwx are actually okayish...) filename. I know chmod is more or less like this. But I don't stand it. It's like combinatoric problems, something deep inside of me refuses to accept doing it :)

I guess you know what grep stands for, don't you? It's a "legacy" command from an early version of ed, g/re/p as in "global search" a "re"gex "p"rinting results. It could be named re (for regex, search implicit) or res (I like this.) Anyway, I use ag (the silver searcher) for text/code search, though. Less letters, easier to use (I keep forgetting if I need -r, -e and all that, ag makes it somewhat easier.)

As for mv, cp, rm, if all 2-letter acronyms were that easy to remember! Did you use extensively DOS? Most commands where far too verbose, I cringe if thinking about having to write copy to copy. Cp is just a smash with the left hand and another with the right hand and off you go. Minimise errors, 2 strokes. Actually now I wonder why in nix we have clear and not cls (or just cl)

As a matter of names... Plan9 uses nix names, and since Plan9 tried to do things "differently" almost just for the sake of it, either they didn't think about it or thought it was a bad idea.

Why did you type it's instead of it is? Is it really so much work to type one more character to justify this? :-)

The shell is a working language as much as English is. You'll spend more time using it than learning it, so get crackin'.

Meh, whats one word cloud over another? We can just say the reason for Unix is because: history, and be done with the discussion .. throw a bit of 'its probably because IBM Selectric had easy keys for | and blah' seasoning, douse a fair bit of flamage with bowls of "oh, the monte-carlo on the keypresses says that its all EMACS fault" kerosene, but then again, like I said: whats one word cloud over another? I've heard much relief, for example, from the no-more-Powershell-users who finally 'grok' bash, while (1) grep :P * ; done