Debian's which hunt

To clearly state my bias up front: I've used various Unices since the mid-80's, and have always used 'which' (although I'm aware of 'type' in Bash). I'd not heard of 'command' until reading this article.

There's a kind of fundamentalism in the Unix world that sees the POSIX specification as some sort of authority. In my experience, this was mostly a problem in the transition to System V: Solaris tended towards POSIX compliance (or was it the other way around?) and SunOS was more historically based on BSD. The /usr/ucb tree saved my finger memory for many years.

HP/UX had a similar split, IIRC.

Linux has mostly been free of this kind of dogma. It took the GNU coreutils/shutils/etc and ran with them, but every so often little things popped up, and the gaps were plugged by things like bsdutils, bsdmainutils, and (apparently) debianutils.

Sometimes it's useful to have people move forward: newer ways can be better ways. But 'which' vs. 'command -v' ... is that really an improvement? Is it really a problem to have both available by default?