91–100 of 101 posts
"python - is of course a Monty Python reference" I had no idea! Makes me love it even more.
And the Python Package Index, https://pypi.python.org/pypi , is also known as the "Cheese Shop".
"python - is of course a Monty Python reference" I had no idea! Makes me love it even more.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I personally find the man pages very dense and poorly organized. `man grep` for example is my own personal nightmare. I think the man pages should introduce a policy of simple usage examples instead of throwing 99% of information you don't care about at you at once. Something like http://bropages.org/
If you want high quality man pages go look at openBSD base, truly exceptional. Even then, man pages nowadays are massive compared to what they were intended to be, complexity is the bane of all software.
> Giving cryptic names to software is a well-established UNIX tradition God, this is so true! I seriously think that world would be much better already if we would just rename many of well-established binaries and C-functions to more-intuitive, better convention. Even without changing APIs that much (which would be great too, of course).
Good luck with that. We can't even give the creat() system call an 'e' at the end. (Not that it should be used much these days; the 'creat() then open()' idiom is a race condition waiting to happen, so 'open()' has grown the ability to create-and-open in one atomic operation. That seems to handle most of the file creation that Unix programs need to do.)
The etymology of Unix programs: very interesting! The writers of this page also have a sense of humor: > bc > originally a front-end for dc ("desk-calculator"); modern GNU bc is instead a backwards-compatible byte-code interpreter for dc, but what it stands for is still "basic calculator"
While a lot of the names have humorous origins, I don't see the humor in this particular entry at all? Can you explain?
Byte Code
The etymology of Unix programs: very interesting! The writers of this page also have a sense of humor: > bc > originally a front-end for dc ("desk-calculator"); modern GNU bc is instead a backwards-compatible byte-code interpreter for dc, but what it stands for is still "basic calculator"
While a lot of the names have humorous origins, I don't see the humor in this particular entry at all? Can you explain?
Great fun. One minor nitpick - the story of "Apache Server" being originally derived from "A Patchy Server" is a long-standing myth; the name was originally intended to be a tribute to the Apache Native American peoples. The Wikipedia article on Apache ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_HTTP_Server ) includes a link to an interview with Brian Behlendorf ( http://www.linux-mag.com/id/472/ ) where he explains how th…
So either Brian was deliberately propagating the myth himself ... or maybe there's some retconning going on.