I’m nostalgic about old Unix too, but it’s just that: nostalgia. In reality, Unix was the system that brought us such elegant well-designed APIs as gets(3) and strtok(3).

You're confusing learning with memorization.

It's the lowest, easiest level of learning.

Exactly that. Well said. I can control my learning but memory? Not as much.

How does it work for you in practice? Nobody can contribute to the code base until they have grown into grumpy greybeards, after years of feeling stupid and inadequate? So they can finally write code that is complicated and can only understood by other experts, because code is complicated and supposed to be used by experts only?

I’m so glad I don’t have someone like you on my team.

Everyone learns as they go, including me. I actually make use of the thing inside my head, which I'm being paid to use. There's nothing "complicated" about a bit of memorisation.

Imagine a pilot, plumber, or electrician not wanting to learn the language of the trade. No other profession I know of is as self-destructive to intelligence as the software industry.

I’m so glad I don’t have someone like you on my team.

I don't want lazy brainless losers either, because that's what you're advocating for.

Nobody here was advocating against learning and memorising, but for writing code that is as self-evident and unambiguous as possible.

Talk to any electrician which kinds of diagrams they prefer; those were a fellow was clever, trying to compress stuff as much as possible, or those that are clearly readable and easy to understand. Pilots carry heaps of documentation with them on the plane, walk through checklists instead of trying to memorise what to do. Your argument doesn’t hold up the slightest scrutiny.

I’m advocating for a culture of helping people hone their skills by learning from others instead of being turned off by their arrogance. That’s a very different thing from encouraging them to avoid thinking.

Learning that this tool can be used do these things, manipulate these objects or stream of data like this, and that this tool is useful in combination with these other tools are the valuable part. Memorizing some arbitrary encoding of the parameters are not really useful when I can offload it to my language center in the brain and basically get that part for free...

Why do you conflate learning with memorizing? man <command> is easy to do. And you take notes, write script, functions and alias for things you do often.

Learning is one thing and being able to comprehend a piece of code at a glance is another. I might know them but wouldn’t immediately remember all the past and future short form of flags ever written. What is even the point of that? If I am comfortable with the essence of what they do, does it really matter that much if I have that ingrained in my memory that -r does foo while -f does bar?

I’ve got almost 30 years of using UNIX shells and I’ve learnt a lot more than most, but there are plenty of tools that have things like -r and -R that do radically different things and I don’t always remember the difference between them. If it’s written --recursive then it’s a lot clearer. Clarity is useful even when you have a lot of knowledge and experience.

As someone who works on a team of people with different levels of experience, where understanding is more important than some self-inflicted purity test of their unix chops, I will always either do long options or, where that’s not possible, a comment explaining the short options.

No one is complaining about not having time to learn: you’re arguing against a strawman. The point is not to discourage learning, it’s to encourage clarity in a context where it can at times be critically important.