[Catalyst] Remove .pl from scripts?

[Christopher Hicks]

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>

There are two ways of constructing a software design. One way is to make 
it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies. And the other way 
is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies.
  -- C.A.R. Hoare