Comment by xenadu02

> At least allow us to use names instead of numbers.

You can for the destination. That's the whole reason you need the "&": to tell the shell the destination is not a named file (which itself could be a pipe or socket). And by default you don't need to specify the source fd at all. The intent is that stdout is piped along but stderr goes directly to your tty. That's one reason they are separate.

And for those saying "<" would have been better: that is used to read from the RHS and feed it as input to the LHS so it was taken.