English Idiom in Unix: Directory Recursively

[Xah Lee]

On May 25, 12:26 am, Thorsten Kampe <thors... at thorstenkampe.de> wrote:
> * Rikishi42 (Wed, 25 May 2011 00:06:06 +0200)
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> > On 2011-05-24, Steven D'Aprano <steve+comp.lang.pyt... at pearwood.info> wrote:
> > >>> I think that is a patronizing remark that under-estimates the
> > >>> intelligence of lay people and over-estimates the difficulty of
> > >>> understanding recursion.
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> > >> Why would you presume this to be related to intelligence? The point was
> > >> not about being *able* to understand, but about *needing* to understand
> > >> in order to use.
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> > > Maybe they don't "need" to understand recursion. So what?
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> > I think you should read the earlier posts again, this is drifting so far
> > from what I intended.
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> > What I mean is: I'm certain that over the years I've had more than one
> > person come to me and ask what 'Do you wish to delete this directory
> > recursively?' meant. BAut never have I been asked to explain what 'Do you
> > wish to delete this directory and it's subdirs/with all it's contents?'
> > meant. Never.
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> Naming something in the terms of its implementation details (in this
> case recursion) is a classical WTF.
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> On the other hand, it's by far not the only WTF in Unix. For instance,
> how often have you read "unlink" instead of "delete"? Or "directory"
> instead of "folder", pointing out that "directory" is the correct term
> because a directory is just a listing and does not "contain" the actual
> files. Of course these implementation details will never matter to
> anyone except under the rarest conditions.
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> Thorsten

well said.

half of posts in this thread are from idiots. just incredible, but
again, its newsgroups ... what am i thinking ...

 Xah