The one major thing I really like about the terseness of these commands is that, although they have a steeper learning curve at first, once you learn them --- which happens quickly with repeated use --- they feel very natural and you use them almost as if they're an extension of English, like a special dialect; talking with coworkers, we use words like "cat", "grep", "ls", "sudo", etc. as verbs.

Contrast this with the verbosity of more "modern" command languages like Powershell: while those may be a bit easier to understand the very first time, every time thereafter it feels like you're talking in a language where every word is a minimum of 10 letters and two syllables long. The mental overhead is far higher.

I've always remembered "bss" as the "bull-shit segment" --- because it initially doesn't have any useful content.