I've been happy for a few years with my 17" System76 laptop. Came with Ubuntu preinstalled, and has worked fine through two major OS version upgrades. Really fast boot with the OS on an SSD drive.
Cat seems fine to me, since for most usages the con- is not necessary, and is redundant. Which makes it unfortunate that concatenate is the de-facto standard term, over catenate.
You're probably right but English, as well as UNIX, has conventions which are widely used. Going against them requires a lot of work and I'm not sure that the benefits are worth it.
"concatenate" is a lot more known than "catenate". And I'm pretty sure that even "concatenate" is quite low in usage compared to a more common verb (or set of verbs) which could be used to describe what cat does ("show", "join", "merge", "unify", etc).
Anyway, I was mostly ranting since at this point both "concatenate" as a de-facto standard term and "cat" as a default UNIX tool will probably outlive me and most likely my descendants as well :)
In 1985, Peter Naur wrote a similar article presenting programming as theory building. In essence, a programmer primarily constructs a mental model of the problem, and its
solution; secondarily writes code; and incidentally documents. Naur discusses how this view affects program life and modification, system development methods, and the professional status of programmers.
https://www.ft.com/content/34859346-b023-11e7-8076-0a4bdda92...