In general, many popular unix utilities are cryptically named and they are not holistically designed. Consequently different programs take different flags for the same semantic, or some flags must be prefixed with a single dash and others with two dashes, or some flags are required to be passed in a particular order, or to view the docs for some commands it's `man command` and for others it's a `--help` flag but in all cases they're written for power users, or the fact that gnu utilities don't have the same interface as bsd utilities, etc.

And then there's the hot mess that is bash (or sh or zsh or...)...