Orthogonality for orthogonality's sake is not something I'm keen on.
Part of language design is perturbing the proposed feature in various directions to see how it might generalize in the future.
Just don't create a file called '-rf.'
It won't be covered in the book. The source code has to be useful for something, after all.
Even the White House has a press agent.
Many days I don't write any code at all, and some days I spend all day writing code.