fubo

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.

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.

S

I recommend picking up Graham Hutton's short text Programming in Haskell, Second Edition. Even if you don't end up using Haskell in "real work" (and you might!) it will teach you a remarkable number of things about how functional programming works.

England has a surfeit of terms for obnoxious people.

• Jobsworth (obstructive clerk or bureaucrat)
• God-botherer (religious fanatic)
• Cockwomble
• Minging cockwomble
• Tremulous bollock-for-lobsters cockwomble
• Sir Æthelbert Plonker Cockwomble of the Drubbing-over-Head Cockwombles

I may have made those last two up.

The term "open source software" was coined specifically to refer to software licensing that recognizes a particular set of freedoms. It is not a generic term for source-available software, and never was.

One of the freedoms of open source is "no discrimination against fields of endeavor."

Calling the Hippocratic license family "open source" is inaccurate, since its entire goal is to discriminate against certain fields of endeavor.

It's better described as a sort of source-available license.

Lichess may be the best board game software for any board game ever. It's that good.

Eight: English, German, French, Spanish, Latin, Russian, Japanese, ASL.

Bonus question: do you ever do your counting in a non-native language, just to make it more interesting?

Russian occasionally. ASL when I'm counting how many seconds the cat has to stay quiet before I give her a treat.

The ruble is worth more than the penny, but it's way down from 2008 when it was almost a nickel.

Remember when a "pop-up blocker" was a browser plug-in because the browsers didn't yet consider it a competitive feature?

(Well, okay, Opera and iCab did.)

Number of ads my OS shows me: 0

Split Colemak on an Iris keyboard.