I always think of links as pointing from source to destination. Your way would break that intuition for me. It would be the source of the address and the destination for the address to be copied to.

Remember it like this: just as in cp, the file that already exists comes first, the file/link we are creating now comes second.

I understand fully; that’s also how I thought of it for years and why I couldn’t ever remember it. But if you think about it like copying a file it’s easier to remember. And it is like copying a file— it’s copying a reference to a file.

Try taking the command a step back with hardlinks: ln source dest

The association with cp makes a lot more sense then. This is how I learned it.