> If there were some kind of usage study or telemetry

This still wouldn't convince me because it's not what my argument is about.

(Fwiw, I think one of the reasons BS is upset is how frequent the issue is brought up. You can see his frustration in the GitHub issues too. And how he points to it being at the top of the readme and it still doesn't get through to people. Just like a sign on a door saying pull. There's a reason that doesn't work. Why literate people keep failing. Ask why and how it can be prevented.)

I know I'm miscommunicating but I'm really not sure how. Because it isn't about what most people do. It isn't about what most people what. I know this sounds odd, and maybe that's what's getting in the way.

Maybe I shouldn't say error because you're thinking the tool has errored? How about user mistake? When user uses the tool wrong? When something unexpected happens? Any of these will substitute. It's all about when I user does something and it's not what they think they're doing. Similarly I understand how it appears I'm arguing for verbose by default, and in a way I am (I'm not blind to this lol), but I'm also not really. But when talking about verbosity in terms of programs I think we'd need to distinguish number of words from what kind of words. Though I think it's not uncommon for debug or warnings to be misclassified as info haha.

Design is about communication. Any command you enter gives you feedback. Returning nothing or returning too much are feedback, the tool communicating to you. That's why this is less about majority of the time and user preference. Most of the time I want to filter dotfiles. But I don't always and that still won't convince me because it's orthogonal to my argument. I think if you can see why you might understand my argument a bit more. Because you still seem to be focusing on it being about preferences when it's not. It's about the information users get back when they enter commands and what that means and tells the user. I know this sounds like preference, but it isn't. This is why I brought up Norman Doors before. I wouldn't fault someone for thinking a vertical bar on a door that you push is just preference because we don't talk about these types of language and just expect people to get it. But it isn't preference, it is bad design. I think if you watch this you'll understand my argument much better (it's 5 minutes haha). Because I think you'll understand why one could say that they way these doors are made are objectively bad but it looks like it's all about aesthetics

https://youtu.be/yY96hTb8WgI

So design isn't just about aesthetics, it is about language. Albeit an unspoken and unwritten one.

> Maybe your issue with these tools is that the names of them shadow their coreutils counterparts,

Please see my initial post. I think we've been talking so much that things got lost.

> I'm not fucking around I will destroy everything

We shouldn't get rid of sudo. But yes, requiring an explicit action to enter this mode is the design principle I'm discussing.

> Hillel Wayne had a great post about it

I didn't like the post tbh. His issue is better solved by writing a better comment. The comment is terrible and doesn't communicate what it needs to. But most people think they're far better at writing and communicating than they actually are. If I'm doubt, let my own comments serve as examples lol.

It also has poor assumptions. Ones that work for him if he is the only one using the code but I think it's absurd to think a lack of comment will be reliably interpreted as intentional and holding meaning that the function is inefficient. It only works if comments are highly prolific. And a new person coming in will assume that it's just because of how common this is and it's a more likely explanation.

But he's right about not using self documenting code in that cumbersome way. That is, as you say, too much.

I do apologize. This conversation has been exhausting for me. Not really because of you but there's been several people I've talked with. I do appreciate you comments and the conversation. I will almost always be happy to engage in long form and nuanced conversations. So when you see me again don't hesitate to word dump on me lol. Distilling words is very hard, takes a lot of time, and a lot of skill. But I come to HN because I hate Twitter