The fact that certain devices cab be damaged by the wrong cable is inexcusable.

This is like complaining "mv ~ /dev/null" does what it is meant to do.

I know

- "Keep It Simple, Stupid"

is a thing, but so is

- "UNIX was not designed to stop its users from doing stupid things, as that would also stop them from doing clever things."

Disagree. This is an engineering failure. You have to look at reality; it's often not easy to tell what kind of cable you are planning to use. Any command line interaction is decidedly more involved than the typical user plugging in a cable. This type of interaction should have been planned for and mitigated.

This also has nothing to do with UNIX.

- "Any command line interaction is decidedly more involved than the typical user plugging in a cable."

Right. "The typical user plugging a cable". I expect the user to become a "typical user" after learning how to choose and use a cable, and getting acquainted with his hardware and software. One is not born a typical user, as you seem to imply (plugging a cable is not a complex task). It is. Everything is complex. Using the command line is complex, and then you factor your "typical uses" into aliases or scripts.

Or maybe you curl | bash scripts from the web, and then cry when they fail / your box catches internet aids.

Or you use an ipad for all the computing you do, and expect things to just work.

See: a typical everyday usecase: https://github.com/alex/what-happens-when

Did the user write "oogle.com" instead of google, and got malware? ....Inexcusable, as you said? Should it just work?

I say: "why did the user write oogle.com? Did he want malware?"

Simple stuff.