Comment by hiAndrewQuinn
6 days ago
>At the beginning of a language's life, everybody's a beginner. Over time the ratio of experts to beginners changes, and this leads to more focus on "expert-friendly" features, like terser syntax.
Hence why so many shell classics are so short. You don't type R-I-P-G-R-E-P, you type R-G and get on with it, which itself probably evolved from something like the author's own `alias eg="grep -r"` pattern back in the day (that's me spitballing, I don't have proof of that claim).
> probably evolved from something like the author's own `alias eg="grep -r"` pattern
this is from the official faq:
> When I first started writing ripgrep, I called it rep, intending it to be a shorter variant of grep. Soon after, I renamed it to xrep since rep wasn't obvious enough of a name for my taste. And also because adding x to anything always makes it better, right?
> Before ripgrep's first public release, I decided that I didn't like xrep. I thought it was slightly awkward to type, and despite my previous praise of the letter x, I kind of thought it was pretty lame. Being someone who really likes Rust, I wanted to call it "rustgrep" or maybe "rgrep" for short. But I thought that was just as lame, and maybe a little too in-your-face. But I wanted to continue using r so I could at least pretend Rust had something to do with it.