Depends, for one thing one how frequently you intend to use it. Consider variable names, it is often said that it is desirable to have nice, long explanatory names. But again it depends. For variables that have big scopes, it is indeed important to have descriptive names, but those that disappear after the line, its ok to use i,j,k. In fact short names in such cases increase comprehension rather than impede it. The reverse holds as well.

   > Certainly, the learn curve is much steep for Unix
   > utilities than, say, Python

I am not certain about that at all. Yes they may have trucload of options, but I have never had to memorize them. Many disagree that these tools really dont strictly adhere to the "do one thing but do it well" philosophy they do that to a satisfying degree of approximation. Coreutils, textutils, find and xargs can go a really really long way.