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.
Case insensitive is more intuitive and MUCH safer.
You do not want every Windows user to live in a world where Office.exe, office.exe, Offlce.exe and 0fflce.exe are all different files.
OSs and filesystems aren’t built for programmers, they’re built for grandmas. Programmers just happen to use them. It’s much more sensible to give programmers a harder time fixing bugs and incompatibilities than it is to make the user experience even marginally worse.
I mean, all due respect for the guy, but that is an absolutely terrible opinion and I will die on this hill.
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, andPOST. 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.
HEADandheadare 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/HEADfromlibwww-perlonto a Mac with the classic filesystem overwrote/usr/bin/headand broke various things.Case insensitive is more intuitive and MUCH safer.
You do not want every Windows user to live in a world where Office.exe, office.exe, Offlce.exe and 0fflce.exe are all different files.
OSs and filesystems aren’t built for programmers, they’re built for grandmas. Programmers just happen to use them. It’s much more sensible to give programmers a harder time fixing bugs and incompatibilities than it is to make the user experience even marginally worse.
I mean, all due respect for the guy, but that is an absolutely terrible opinion and I will die on this hill.
Your grandma will never type file names in shell, she’ll use Open File dialog, where case sensitivity does not matter.