And yes, brevity is pretty fundamental to its early culture. Unix was created by mathematicians and scientists that were using it every work day to get stuff down and they recognised and extolled in their writings the power of notation. Imagine maths without superscripts, Σ, etc. So it is with Unix. More wordy notations existed in other OSes at the time, and more noisy commands, e.g. VMS would tell you that "dir/size/owner/prot foo." completed normally, even though that's hopefully the norm. It gets very annoying. :-)
VMS was written later, with a faster interface. Also, you didn't need to specify the entire long option, you only needed to type enough to disambiguate between "/all" and "/almostall" (for instance).
Also, based on the poor advice of this thread's subject, surely one should always write /almostall in one's DCL script for clarity and to lessen the chance of ambiguity as the command evolves? grep's -i is only ever going to mean -i.
VMS died, DCL was often ridiculed, its over-verbose style was a part of that. Its lack of power played a larger part.
> Unix users should not following the article's advice, they should be embracing Unix's style and ethos; it's part of what's made it such a success.
I always wonder why this is taken so religiously? You're not the first person to write a comment like this, so please don't take it too personally. But is it not possible that the Unix style and ethos is mostly great, but there's a few things here and there that could've been better? You seem to imply that a culture that prefers short options is one of the reasons that Unix became a success. I'm not so sure.
In fact, if `dir /w` had a long version of the option, i would've indeed used it. I think it's a shame that most native Windows commands, unlike their Unix counterparts, don't have long versions of switches. But I doubt that that's contributed much to Windows' success.