Conversely: that two files that differ in name only by non-visible and humanly-impossible-to-detect details is an enormous user-experience fail.
this post was submitted on 25 Apr 2025
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What about case insensitive programming languages?
Im a python programmer so I'm used to it, but my coworkers are SAS programmers that is case insensitive and they keep getting errors when trying to write python because of that.
Python is case insensitive? Or do mean that it's not? The phrasing is a little confusing.
Python is case sensitive. I think they're saying their coworkers are writing case insensitive code which is causing errors (perhaps writing myFunction and then calling it via myfunction which would result in an undefined error)
Ouch. Relying on case sensitivity is a lousy coding choice, anyway. No one is made better off by having a case change carry meaning.
Edit: Before anyone asks, I like case convention as a courtesy, too. But my code doesn't rely on it.
TIL case insensitive filesystems are still a thing actually in use.
Why lol
I believe macOS's default partition is case-insensitive but not case-preserving. I remember having to check the HUnit (unit testing library for Haskell) in a special partition because darcs barfed on a file whose case changed.
I remember that the BeFS in BeOS was also case-preserving but not case-sensitive. Scot Hacker, the author of the BeOS Bible, relayed an explanation that resonated with him. (Bear in mind that this was pre-2000 and the computing landscape was much different. This was also the time that macOS was born in.)
The short of it is that it's for usability. The average person doesn't really differentiate between upper- and lowercase; at most, it's just aesthetics. If they want to find their resume, they don't care if it's spelled resume, Resume, RESUME, or even rEsUmE. Why should the computer require that they conform to a design decision that was made decades prior?
Since then, the world has changed again and the average user of today is even further isolated from the internals of a system. And what was a good idea in 1997 may not longer be relevant now.
Windows. Probably.
Believe it or not, NTFS isn't, but Windows is to keep ye olde DOS compatibility lol.
Mac's APFS is like this too, to an extent. I don't know the details but it's also in that gray area.
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