Other than being fun; I can't quite see the benefit of making my shell more verbose. I'm sure I am not the only one who can get by with the regular commands through mnemonics.
And to further my point; if this was such a good idea, then why has nobody aliased 'ls' to list, 'cp' to copy, (etc.)? Or, while we're at it, 'list files', or 'list files in current directory'. Maybe someone has and I just didn't meet them yet.
I do see the point of a programming language to be a bit more verbose, since it makes sharing between humans easier, as understanding old codebases – but even there, people are split (Java is too verbose! Ruby is natural! Lisp is too much abbreviated! etc.). But using a shell, issuing commands, is fundamentally different to programming, in my opinion. Consider the analogy of a crane (just to avoid cars for once), what would you prefer: Waving your finger around in thin air, or using levers? And before you answer that: while the former seems way more cool, it doesn't work well. Getting rid of mechanical controls has been tried experimentally by the Air force (I read that back in the 90's; sorry no link to a source now): They were able to interpret commands from the pilots brainwaves, but manual control was consistently faster. We humans just evolved this way: Thinking of moving a plane into particular direction is slower than moving your hand accordingly to yank a stick – it seems to have a higher more mental load for us. Do you picture your arm moving your mouse? I bet you "just do".
But I digress; though the fundamentals in play are the same. My fingers are fast; why should I slow down the whole thing by making them type more?
Of course, a shell using of single-letter commands would be equally useless to an overly verbose shell. The sweet spot, in the end, might be a personal preference and dependent of daily usage and experience. In my case, that's a bit more than the POSIX command set, and – to exaggerate a bit – not writing essays on the command line.
The whole point of this is when you don't remember the command which you are trying to achieve. (See the author's comment[1]: "Betty just grew out of my cheat sheet of commands. I was tired of repeatedly looking up things in my cheat sheet or Google, and decided to make this.")
I'd say the time spent looking it up (and maybe creating an alias/script) is less than typing it verbosely each time.
I don't see 'betty whats my ip address' as a valid alternative to 'ip addr list'. And in case of 'betty next song' vs. osascript -e 'tell application "iTunes" to skip to next track' I'd just alias the latter to something short & memorable (though I just wrote it from memory).
It becomes interesting when you can tell Betty to do things you don't otherwise know how to do. (How do you tell iTunes to skip this song from the cmd line? I don't know, and I'm too lazy to look it up.)
And to further my point; if this was such a good idea, then why has nobody aliased 'ls' to list, 'cp' to copy, (etc.)? Or, while we're at it, 'list files', or 'list files in current directory'. Maybe someone has and I just didn't meet them yet.
I do see the point of a programming language to be a bit more verbose, since it makes sharing between humans easier, as understanding old codebases – but even there, people are split (Java is too verbose! Ruby is natural! Lisp is too much abbreviated! etc.). But using a shell, issuing commands, is fundamentally different to programming, in my opinion. Consider the analogy of a crane (just to avoid cars for once), what would you prefer: Waving your finger around in thin air, or using levers? And before you answer that: while the former seems way more cool, it doesn't work well. Getting rid of mechanical controls has been tried experimentally by the Air force (I read that back in the 90's; sorry no link to a source now): They were able to interpret commands from the pilots brainwaves, but manual control was consistently faster. We humans just evolved this way: Thinking of moving a plane into particular direction is slower than moving your hand accordingly to yank a stick – it seems to have a higher more mental load for us. Do you picture your arm moving your mouse? I bet you "just do".
But I digress; though the fundamentals in play are the same. My fingers are fast; why should I slow down the whole thing by making them type more?
Of course, a shell using of single-letter commands would be equally useless to an overly verbose shell. The sweet spot, in the end, might be a personal preference and dependent of daily usage and experience. In my case, that's a bit more than the POSIX command set, and – to exaggerate a bit – not writing essays on the command line.