I don't think it's really bash, more the utilities' inconsistent APIs and single-letter flags (which are not descriptive at all). Each command has its own API with different options, so it takes a lot of exposure to really learn them.

If you don't like single letter flags, most have options for longer, more descriptive flags that do the same thing. For example, you can either do:

   Make -I dir

or

   Make --include-dir=dir

Choose whichever one makes most sense.

this.

anyone who uses single letter options on a script should be punished.

single letters are for one time typing.

Single letters are sometimes more known than their full option equivalents. Quick, without a man page, what's the short alias for `tar --get` ?

I have no idea because I memorized 'tar zxvf' a long time ago [1] and I have to google everything else.

[1] https://xkcd.com/1597/

I thought you'd post this one https://xkcd.com/1168/

These days tar autodetects zipfiles, and you don't usually need to see the files as they come out, so you can do 'tar xf' instead...

I wouldn't use "--get". If I wanted to use the long option, I'd use "--extract".

Until you find yourself on (Free)BSD, where it doesn't look like the long options are supported: https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?make(1)

It's here: https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=gmake

It depends:

    .

is portable, whereas:

    source

is not... which was a surprise. :)