And to add to your point, in my experience I've had "long-lived" scripts that the flags change meaning over the years. This is extremely rare on base-level installs, but frighteningly more common on the inhouse-programs I've had to deal with.
The long flags are less likely to be changed over time. The script will usually fail gracefully and I don't also need to relearn what I was thinking 25 years ago when I first did it. (long flags are like in-command comments too)
And as others have pointed out -v(ersion) or -v(erbose) can happen too.
The worst (well known) offender is grep -v meaning grep --invert-match just for the sheer bafflement of "verbose" now hiding what you were looking for.
That actually comes from ed and vi. The g command would search for a line that matches a given regular expression and run the following command on that line. The v command was the inverse (search for lines that don't match the given regular expression).
The default command was to just print the line. Hence the name grep
To be fair, the JVM predates GNU-style --long flags being "standard". Lots of older programs use "X11-style" -long flags (that many pre-X11 programs used, like `find`).
Same! Somehow I also start confusing this with somewhat related tools like gcc. It's rare enough that I need to query these that it's all blurry in my memory again by next time. "huh I guess gcc was that goofy one with just one dash.." Nope.
