Short options make it quick and easy to use commands you use all the time.
Your little bashism was quick for me to read because it was compact, scannable, and used popular programs I use frequently (cut, sed etc). Yes, you need to look up the options for programs you don't use often but you need to look them up anyway because you don't use them frequently.
Conversely the longer example you used had longItentifiersThatNeedParsing (and are too long to fit in your fovea) and worse, are easy to accidentally confuse with say longItentifiersThatNeedNoParsing -- an error you are likely not to see when reading the code and an error you might especially use when your tooling has a pop-up of suggested completions.
The gnu approach of long + short options can help; it would be better if getopt() would write a completion grammar into a section of the ELF file that could be mmap()ed and used by readline(), similar to the TOPS-20 jsys that inspired it.
Your little bashism was quick for me to read because it was compact, scannable, and used popular programs I use frequently (cut, sed etc). Yes, you need to look up the options for programs you don't use often but you need to look them up anyway because you don't use them frequently.
Conversely the longer example you used had longItentifiersThatNeedParsing (and are too long to fit in your fovea) and worse, are easy to accidentally confuse with say longItentifiersThatNeedNoParsing -- an error you are likely not to see when reading the code and an error you might especially use when your tooling has a pop-up of suggested completions.
The gnu approach of long + short options can help; it would be better if getopt() would write a completion grammar into a section of the ELF file that could be mmap()ed and used by readline(), similar to the TOPS-20 jsys that inspired it.