[Catalyst] Remove .pl from scripts?

[David Storrs]

On Nov 20, 2005, at 8:49 AM, Christopher Hicks 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,

Thanks for your points.  A few thoughts for you:

	1) I think sri already made the call, and I think he has the moral  
authority to make it.

	2) As Aaron Peterson said before I could type this, tab completion  
answers your keystrokes issue.

	3) I for one do not want symlinks: I don't want twice as many files  
sitting around, one set with and one set without extensions.

	4) You failed to address the most compelling point which is that  
file extensions are useful *to humans*.  Being able to glance at a  
list of files and recognize the Perl ones is useful.  Yes, I could  
run 'file' on each of them--if I was on an operating system that had  
'file'--but that takes longer than a casual glance.  I do not feel  
that I should be put out to satisfy someone else's sense of aesthetics.

	5) This *is* a question of pure aesthetics.  That's it, nothing  
more.  It's a bikeshed, let it go.

Folks, this is purely a matter of taste.  There are no major issues  
here of any kind.  If you don't like the extensions, rename the files  
to get rid of them.  But please, stop flooding the list.

</rant>

--Dks