No relation to the sports channel.

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  • 360 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
Cake day: June 9th, 2023
  • fubo@lemmy.worldtoProgramming@programming.dev•“I noticed a clear violation of our contributing guidelines”
    9·
    3 days ago

    Okay, let’s skip the formal logic talk then and go straight to linguistics.

    The question “Good to merge?” does not contain a grammatical error. It is perfectly well-formed by the grammar that native English speakers actually follow in everyday communication. A grammar that fails to parse “Good to merge?” in context cannot parse native English speakers’ actual output.

    Schoolbook English is not native English, because it’s not how native English speakers actually speak. Schoolbook English contains rules that directly contradict native English speakers’ everyday usage.

    (Standard examples include the rule against split infinitives and the rule against ending a sentence with a preposition. These are not grammatical rules of English as it is spoken by native speakers. To boldly assert them is silliness up with which I will not put.)

  • fubo@lemmy.worldtoProgramming@programming.dev•“I noticed a clear violation of our contributing guidelines”
    8·
    3 days ago

    The guideline (as applied) contains a contradiction, so the principle of explosion applies.

    Specifically, there is a contradiction between “native-sounding English” and “no grammatical errors”, when the latter phrase is interpreted in the manner seen here. Native speakers quite often use sentence fragments and in other ways do not follow schoolbook “proper grammar”. In fact, second-language learners often use schoolbook grammar where a native speaker would use a more relaxed register.

    Since the guideline contains a contradiction, it is either impossible to follow (i.e. forbids all communication whatsoever) or impossible to violate (i.e. forbids no communication).

  • fubo@lemmy.worldtoLinux@programming.dev•Linus Torvalds Expresses His Hatred For Case-Insensitive File-Systems
    5·
    3 months ago

    But if someone creates a file called HEAD, should it overwrite a file called head?

    That shouldn’t matter to the “nontechnical” end-user at all. To the nontechnical user, even the abstraction of “creating a file” has largely gone away. You create a document, and changes you make to it are automatically persisted to storage, either local or cloud.

    Only the technical command-line user cares about whether /usr/bin/HEAD and /usr/bin/head are the same path. And only in a specific circumstance — such as the early days of Mac OS X, where the Macintosh and Unix cultures collided — could the bug that I described emerge.

  • fubo@lemmy.worldtoLinux@programming.dev•Linus Torvalds Expresses His Hatred For Case-Insensitive File-Systems
    75·
    3 months ago

    I recall a case-insensitivity bug from the early days of Mac OS X.

    There are three command-line utilities that are distributed as part of the Perl HTTP library: GET, HEAD, and POST. These are for performing the HTTP operations of those names from the command line.

    But there’s also a POSIX-standard utility for extracting the first few lines of a text file. It’s called head.

    I think you see where I’m going with this. HEAD and head are the same name in a case-insensitive filesystem such as the classic Mac filesystem. They are different names on a Unix-style filesystem.

    Installing /usr/bin/HEAD from libwww-perl onto a Mac with the classic filesystem overwrote /usr/bin/head and broke various things.