Programmer Humor

Super cool, I realized I was thinking of the wargame A Few Acres Of Snow by martin wallace (the designer of the modern classics, Brass Birmingham and Brass Lancashire)

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/79828/a-few-acres-of-snow

What’s a windows?

Yes, so annoying especially when using source control which is case sensitive.

Rename Hello hello2

Commit

Rename hello2 hello

Commit

Well an uppercase ASCII char is a different char than its lowercase counterpart. I would argue that not differentiating between them is an arbitrary rule that doesn't make any sense, and in many cases, is more computationally difficult as it involves more comparisons and string manipulations (converting everything to lower case).

And the result is that you ultimately get files with visually distinct names, that aren't actually treated as distinct, and so there is a disconnect from how we process information and how the computer is doing it.

'A' != 'a', they are just as unequal as 'a' and 'b'

Edit: I would say the use case is exactly the same as programming case sensitivity, characters have meaning and capitalizing them has intent. Casing strategies are immensely prevalent in programming and carry a lot of weight for identifying programmers' intent (properties vs backing fields as an example) similar intent can be shown with file names.

On Mac when I rename a folder from “FOO” to “foo” git sees them as the same folder so no change is committed. In JavaScript I import a file from “foo” so locally that works. Commit my code and someone else pulls in my changes on their machine. But on their machine the folder is still “FOO” so importing from “foo” doesn’t work.

Think the other way around: What's the use case for case insensitive file names? Does it justify the effort and complexity for the filesystem and the programs to know the difference between lower and upper space chars?

FWIW Dolphin only does it if the filesystem doesn't provide a way to add that metadata directly to the directory and you change the view configuration for that directory away from your standard configuration. Which is how the standard describes to do it. (Some file managers incorrectly add those .directory files to every directory you visit.)

A mac will add a .DS_Store file to any directory just by breathing on it.

today I learned - using Linux at home since 2005ish and I have never had an auto-file generated on any USB attached drives of mine...

Metadata that's a holdover from the 1980s MacOS behavior. Hilariously, today, NTFS supports that metadata better than Apple's own filesystems of today. They can hide it in Alternate Data Streams.