It's a consistent syntax with smart defaults you can leave out. You wouldn't say Unix's wc is inconsistent, would you, just because it has default behavior?

Apples to Oranges. wc is a bad example.

Better example is tar vs cp, where you go

  cp files you want to copy destination/

and

  tar destination.tar files you want to archive

And yes, I would say that's inconsistent.

hum... both are wrong.

wc is "word count" it's not a sane default. it's a obviously explicitly behavior. if git checkout were called 'git checkbranch' then you would have a point.

tar does not have sane defaults. it requires explicit flags. your example (besides not working because as i said, it does not have defaults) could very well be `tar -c files you want to copy -f destination.tar` and all would be well. you actually still repeat the very first tar command line example you ever saw to this day, even not agreeing with it :)