Inconceivable Ruby Script File Extension
Who on earth decided that ruby scripts should end in .rb rather than .ruby?
Modern software is plagued by poor file extensions, mainly because people seem to be terrorfied of using extensions that are longer than three characters. And I just don’t understand it. Assuming that you want to create a portable application, you still are safe provided you don’t plan on supported anything as ancient as DOS or Windows 3.1!
It’s a matter of clarity for me, I have so many files, please make it clear what each file is for.
And xiph.org, thanks a bundle for going with .ogg for all your file formats when you could have chosen .audio and .video for Vorbis and Theora respectively. You could have at least used .vorbis and .theora. It causes no end of trouble for users and applications. In Amarok, we can’t know for sure if we can play an ogg file until we do a mimetype check, which takes ages, and seriously slows down operations the user expects to be instant, like changing the cursor for a drag-and-drop operation to indicate the drop cannot occur, or adding valid files to the playlist. To be honest we just cheat and assume it’s audio.
[Update 15-Jul-2006]
As Ian pointed out, it doesn’t really matter to Amarok that it’s all .ogg. We just ignore the video stream anyway. And the important thing as far as we’re concerned is that the tag reading and manipulation is the same for all ogg files. The problem is harder for application launchers like Konqi, who should launch a video player for video and an audio player for audio. Video and audio are distinctly different as far as the user is concerned and it sucks that perfectionism guided xiph.org rather than practical considerations.
Maybe they’d like to consider:
- .video.ogg
- .audio.ogg
What difference would it make if it was a video? We still just play the audio.
But I agree. Why the hell didn’t Ogg Vorbis name their files .music and .video, would be a lot more user friendly. And whats up with .m4v, .m4a, .m4p etc.
True, although we shouldn’t add video to the collection really, I’m sure we don’t bother checking.
Well with .ogg and .m4v etc which has good metadata (or at least can), why not add it to the collection. They might be music videos.
The funny thing is that .ogm was commonly used for OGG video files until the perfectionist figured out they should use .ogg.
Oh yea, wanted to mention .pl. Is that a perl or a prolog file? You decide!
Quote:
And whats up with .m4v, .m4a, .m4p etc.
Mpeg 4 video, audio and purchased audio respectively. I beleive these formats are owned by apple.
It’s worse really that we add things like “Chelsea Football Match.ogg” to the collection thinking it’s music.
Unfortunately, Ruby (.rb), Python (.py), Perl (.pl) and other languages were created when DOS was still in wide use, hence the short extensions.
And programmers like brevity! People were up in arms when Mac OS X came out with directories named Applications, Library, and System instead of app, lib, and sys.
But I agree that the longer name does make it more readable.
orly? I thought ruby was only a few years old. Shows what I know
Max, work began on Ruby in 1993, and the first public release was 1995.