I've been admining Linux systems for 25 years, and I still have to check which one it is every time.
I appreciate people saying that it's like `cp` or `mount`, but in my head the natural order of thinking about this operation is reversed: it's "create a link to this file" not "make this file also known as this link." Hence two competing "gut feelings" about which should come first. It also doesn't help that commands like "alias" work the opposite direction ("make a new command that is actually this another command").

Anyway, it was really just an observation that I confuse this all the time, and I'm not the greenest Linux admin around. :)

@monsieuricon Yes, it's a Sapir-Whorf thing. Some languages are verb-subject-object, and some are verb-object-subject. Yoda even speaks object-subject-verb (in the original, anyway; it's trickier in the German translation).

Don't think of it as a matter of abstract intuition, but as a matter of foreign language intuition. The intuition of consistency, not the intuition of essence.

@monsieuricon In CP/M, copying used to go the other way: pip destination=source. If Unix has been modelled after that, we'd be doing hard links by pip destination<=souce, and symlinks as pip destination<-source.
@riley @monsieuricon oh I missed this comment and posted mine… (CP/M was my ‘first’ OS)
@mia FWIW, I kind of suspect that CP/M's PIP was, in turn, modelled after something that DEC used to ship with PDP-11, the cradle of OSes. Even Unix comes from it!
@monsieuricon