On 31 October 2016 at 15:50, Christofer C. Bell <christofer.c.b...@gmail.com > wrote:
> > I think the OP's point is that having a hodgepodge of (on their face) > unrelated commands smells kinda unorganized at best and unprofessional at > worst. Wether or not he's right is up to the reader. For me, I agree with > his sentiment. > The solution he's suggesting is to bring all of these commands under one > umbrella either by bundling them in an administrative utility or by giving > them a prefix that shows they're related to "the PostgreSQL database." > He's getting a lot of pushback that really feels it's coming from the > wrong direction. "Just learn it." "It's always been this way." "No one > agrees with you." These arguments are unconvincing. That said, there's > nothing wrong with just saying, "we're not going to change it because we > don't want to." > > There is the issue that by introducing new commands that are better organised, the new user will get introduced to more commands instead of fewer - when they run into a problem or if they bought the book, the commands they'll encounter will be the "old" commands. There's also the learning curve of having a single wrapper-command that can do anything pg-related. The purpose of a command named pg_createuser is obvious, the purpose of a command named pg or pga is not so obvious. Personally, I sometimes work with Firebird for educational purposes and I can't make heads or tails of their command-line tools (with the exception of isql, but only when I remember it was based on Interbase). To me, the pg tools are much easier to remember, even though their naming isn't always consistent. I do think however that having the pg-commands prefixed with pg_ is actually helpful to both new and experienced users. One reason is that it limits the number of commands matched for command completion after typeing pg_ (which is only 3 characters to type). ISTR some argument against using underscores because they would be hard to type, but I can't understand why. That said, renaming the commands provides a rather minor benefit at best. Having this much fuss about it is out of proportion IMHO. I remember learning those commands (when pg 7.4.7 was a big deal) and it certainly did not cost me the majority of time that I needed to learn to use pg, and once I did learn them I knew where to find at least the documentation. My few cents. -- If you can't see the forest for the trees, Cut the trees and you'll see there is no forest.
