[Catalyst] Remove .pl from scripts?

[Aaron Peterson]

On 11/20/05, Christopher Hicks <chicks at chicks.net> wrote:
> On Sat, 19 Nov 2005, Sebastian Riedel wrote:
> > Am 19.11.2005 um 01:26 schrieb Sebastian Riedel:
> >> This question came up after the web frameworks night yesterday, many people
> >> seem to think it's ugly.
> >> Should we remove the .pl extension from scripts?
> >
> > Ok, seems we have a clear no, extensions have to stay.
>
> That's sad.  Why not leave the "proper" files there with their full .pl
> extension glory and for people who are in "open standards compliant"
> enviroments (like everything but Windows these days) offer a little
> convenience and toss in a symlink?  Putting in symlinks doesn't screw up
> editing anything and it saves three keystrokes every time you type one of
> these things all the way out.  It LOOKS hella nicer too.
>
> Extensions have been left out of UNIX commands for a variety of very good
> reasons for 35 years now.  Relying on extensions as ways of seperating
> file types may be more convenient if portability to Windows is a concern,
> but otherwise they're simply clutter.  The Mac had had metadata forks
> since Day 1 and the FOSS world has has file magic for 20+ years now.
> Relying on file extensions is just so reminiscent of the idiot driver who
> followed the Exit Here sign that had fallen askew and ended up landing in
> the ditch.  It would seem you wouldn't have to do this too many times to
> realize where the authoritative information actually is, but computers are
> immune to common sense it often seems.  The lure of treating file
> extensions as real information is admittedly understandable, but given
> that other clearly better solutions exist for the same stuff its only a
> matter of time before noone treats extensions as significant anymore.
> 8.3 filenames died not only from excess of brevity, but because every
> filename had a superfulous dot in it!  :)
>
> But honestly, shouldn't it be enough that we don't want to make users know
> what language every command is written in?  Maybe we want to replace these
> things with shell and batch scripts someday.  Ok, that's not entirely
> serious, but still, the user doesn't, shouldn't, and won't care what
> language command line commands are written in.  Is you cp Perl or C or
> C++?  How about your cc?  What language is your Perl written in?  Aside
> from Windows own band-aid of hiding file extensions by default, you might
> want to recall/realize that our very own Sun Microsystems tweaked things
> in Solaris to run SomeRandomJava.class files as simply SomeRandomJava.
>
> Its pretty funny watching so many half-as$ed attempts at burying file
> extensions, but if the extensions would just stay buried it wouldn't still
> be a problem.  :)
>
> --
> </chris>

I agree about the sillyness of the extension convention.  But come on
man, how hard can it be to make your own links, or use tab completion
if 3 keystrokes is a big concern for you.  Think we're going to change
the way Microsoft likes to do things any time soon?

Aaron