So why do we put up with classic command line tools in general that are so full of horrible, counterintuitive pitfalls? Is it just tradition? Backwards compatibility?
The "Unix should be hard" crew has gotten a lot quieter in the last ten years with the rise of Ubuntu and other relatively user-friendly distros, but I feel like there's still an underlying current of elitism there; people are proud of mastering these bizarre, arcane methods, and they're offended that someone else might be able to accomplish just as much without doing half as much work.
The "Unix should be hard" crew has gotten a lot quieter in the last ten years with the rise of Ubuntu and other relatively user-friendly distros, but I feel like there's still an underlying current of elitism there; people are proud of mastering these bizarre, arcane methods, and they're offended that someone else might be able to accomplish just as much without doing half as much work.