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Unix culture is full of jokes. Why is "T_PAAMAYIM_NEKUDOTAYIM" any less valid than "Printer is on fire"?
by Gordonjcp 4y ago
Unix culture is full of jokes.
Why is "T_PAAMAYIM_NEKUDOTAYIM" any less valid than "Printer is on fire"?
- usrbinbash 4y agoBecause Unix jokes don't make something that should be easy needlessly hard. If a double-colon is missing, then the error message should state that, in the language that 99.9% of the language is written in.
- Gordonjcp 4y agoHow exactly is it needlessly hard? You're going to google what the error message says anyway. Maybe if it's something silly, it'll stick better.
- usrbinbash 4y ago> You're going to google what the error message says anyway If an error message says: syntax error: unexpected {, expecting ) ...I don't have to google anything. I know that there is a '{' that shouldn't be there, or that something else is missing before it, done. If the error message would instead read: syntax error: unexpected NAMIKAKKO, expecting MARUKAKKO ...then I would indeed have to google it, unless I just so happened to know the japanese words for "wave bracket" and "round bracket" My point is: a good message about an error as simple as an unexpected or missing syntactical element can convey all the information I need to fix the problem, without requiring me to invoke a supremely powerful search engine, indexing the largest repository of collective human knowledge in existence, to make sense of it.
- dale_glass 4y agoAs far as I know, the "on fire" joke originated in purely professional environments of the 50s or so, and got added to Linux in the early days when nobody but the most hardcore nerds used it. An obscure in-joke makes sense when the system is used by the dozen people that will get it. It quickly starts being annoying when you go mainstream.