3 ms·
Harm reduction. As it turns out, it's really easy to stick your fingers in your ears and go "the spec says X so tough cookies", but in the real world decisions
by aiiane 10y ago
Harm reduction. As it turns out, it's really easy to stick your fingers in your ears and go "the spec says X so tough cookies", but in the real world decisions tend to be made based on actual user impact, and the impact of killing the prefixed variant for some things would be rather large because there are a lot of developers that made decisions which didn't match the intent of the spec.
- TeMPOraL 10y agoThe flip side of this approach is that this way bugs get enshrined in standards and stay with us forever. As the apocryphal story story goes, by the time the author of Make discovered his coding error he already had ~10 users, so he decided not to bother fixing it - and now, 39 years later, we still have to be careful to use only TABs and not spaces before commands in our Makefiles.
- paulddraper 10y agoThat story would have been better if it had a real mistake.