Title:	Perl.pl
Date:	2003-06-04
Self Righteous:	2
Opinionated:	7
Simply true:	6

I have a bunch of tools available online.

Most of them are written in Perl, which rocks, and is my bitch.

I often find that people take my tools (such as 'album' and 'ePerl') and rename them (to 'album.pl' and 'ePerl.pl'). And they have the right to rename it to whatever they want (though I suppose I could add a clause to my license ;)

But I gotta admit, it kind of bugs me.

And here's why:

I understand that people use the postfix ".pl" to demonstrate that it's perl source, just as .c implies C source, .java implies java source and .f implies that you need to learn a new language, fer chrissakes.

It's a convenience for things like Makefiles and the like.

But you aren't using the perl code as source, you're using it as an executable. Perl doesn't need a makefile, for example. On any modern operating system/shell you just type the command "album" and the language doesn't have anything to do with it. So why should the name of the executable be dependent on the language used? We don't rename 'cat' to 'cat.c' because it was written in C, do we?

To illustrate trouble in this kind of thinking, what if I decided to rewrite one of my tools in a different language? Not only would you have to learn a new command name, but any scripts that call that command would need to be found and rewritten.

Furthermore, the number of utilities you learn about over time is only increasing. Maybe you can remember that your latex converter is called texconv. But do you have to remember what language it's written in is perl, or python, or whatever, so you can remember the entire command name?

Bah.

Throw away this useless naming dependency, it doesn't add value, just confusion.

s/.pl$//;

Question: Is there a fortran optimizer?
Answer: Yes. rm *.f