Re: Is there an alternative filesystem hierarchy that could be adapted to Debian.
On Thu, Mar 11, 2021 at 02:56:16AM +0300, IL Ka wrote:
> They also had small CRTs and slow dot matrix printers.
>
> Every single letter matters: open() has "O_CREAT" flag, not o_create.
But:
Ken Thompson was once asked what he would do differently if he were
redesigning the UNIX system. His reply: "I'd spell creat with an e."
- Kernighan, Brian W.; Pike, Rob (1984). The UNIX programming environment.
That one refers to creat(2) rather than O_CREAT, of course. It's possible
that the spelling of O_CREAT was derived from creat(2) for consistency,
but I don't know whether that's true.
The ergonomics and aesthetics of the command line are not always reflected
in programming languages, because the environments are not the same.
Commands needed to be typed on a teletype console in the middle of the
night to fix problems. Programs could be developed at leisure, with
fancy non-paper-spewing terminals, and with editors that would let you
move the cursor back to previous lines at will to make corrections before
finally submitting the program for compilation.
As such, the greater concerns with a programming language are making it
easy to express your algorithm, and easy to understand existing code.
Conciseness gives a much smaller benefit, and is not prized nearly as
highly, except among bored kids.
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