If you keep crossing into personal attack we are going to have to ban you. No more of this, please.

If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it. Note this one:

"Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread. Find something interesting to respond to instead."

I would guess because nano is meant to be a replacement for pico.

Much to my surprise, I recently found nano was symlinked to pico on macOS. It'd been niggling at me for a while, I'd just assumed I'd been given an older version of nano. Guess I was kind of right.

Pico was the inspiration for Nano. Pico was the standalone editor of the Pine mail client. The problem with Pico and Pine was their restrictive license, therefore clones with a more sane license were created (Nano and Alpine).