this feels like a silly thing to say but even though i’ve been using linux since 2004 I feel like i’m learning recently that the impact of the GNU project’s software (and its design decisions) on me is even bigger than I thought
like even just the fact that (afaik) many of them used Emacs has an impact on me today
(please no “it’s GNU/Linux”)
@b0rk people mock the "GNU Coding Standard" because its specification of how to indent C is legitimately weird. But that's actually the least important part of the document. There is stuff in there about how programs should *behave* that's been much more influential.
https://www.gnu.org/prep/standards/html_node/Program-Behavior.html
@zwol “Please define long-named options that are equivalent to the single-letter Unix-style options. We hope to make GNU more user friendly this way.”
i had no idea this was the goal and it’s so good
@gugurumbe @b0rk It says something about programmer brain that no one has ever seriously explored that possibility as far as I know, even though GNU and many others did do a lot of work on translating the *output* of programs.
Specifically, I think people become accustomed to thinking of programming languages as independent from natural language, even though almost all of them draw heavily on prior understanding of English. To the experienced, command line options are tokens of the scripting language "shell" and thus it maybe doesn't occur to them that they are also words in English that could usefully be translated.
It *would* be good to change that but it may well require a rethink of how the whole "shell" environment works ... which would be a good idea *anyway* of course...
Julia Evans
Zack Weinberg
Vivien (dentelle & numérique)