Valentin Gagarin <valentin@gagarin.work> writes:

> The reasons I wrote it out is that it's more obvious what it does 
> without looking up the documentation.  As a project grows larger and so 
> does the number of tools or options in use, the amount of rare things 
> one needs to "just know" tends to become unmanageable, and the time to 
> decompress a highly compressed representation goes up.
>
> This is, what I consider to be by now classic, advice, which I have 
> assumed to be tacit knowledge:
> https://changelog.com/posts/use-long-flags-when-scripting
>
> Discussion:
> - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5164354 (2013)
> - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24518682 (2020)
>
> In this particular case, nothing would tell me off the cuff what `-I` is 
> supposed to mean for `grep`.  It seems reasonable to be explicit here 
> and avoid the extra round of distraction for readers.  This has even 
> more impact on people with less experience (overall or just with the 
> particular tools).
>
> No action required now, the change is merged and does its thing.  But I 
> suggest considering whether a note on the issue should be added to a 
> document about coding conventions.

I think you're probably right and I'd be happy for the convention to be
changed and documented (but long single lines still avoided).