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Comment by ojkelly | Hacker News Reader

As much as I love the confirmation that .yml is the correct extension, I’m most amazed by the fact that there’s over a TRILLION lines of code public on GitHub.

That’s an astronomical number. And that’s only what we can all see. Can’t imagine how much more is private.

Also, it look’s like 20% of code is comments. Which feels just about right.

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People actually bike shed over .yaml vs .yml? If you thought tabs vs spaces was a useless debate...

Never been comfortable with extension names longer than 3 letters long for some reason..

MS-DOS. The reason is MS-DOS.

Thank you for the EXPLAN~1!

If anyone's curious this references the 8.3 filename shortening that windows was even still doing recently.

Amusingly, that tiny bit of backward compatibility can lead to vulnerabilities as outlined here: https://www.acunetix.com/blog/articles/windows-short-8-3-fil...

It goes back further than that - DOS got the idea of 8.3 filenames from CP/M and before that DEC used three letter file extensions on its minicomputer operating systems. The idea arguably goes back even further into the mainframes of the 1960s although it gets a bit messier then to trace it.

All I'm saying mate, is that we don't pronounce it Yiml now, do we. :D

.yml only makes sense in a word where every other extension is three letters.

With variably length extensions, there isn't a good reason to not just use the full name.

Who cares? Just switch to .jsn and forget about it.

I'm sorry .jon would be more logical Javascript being one word and all.

Surely copy & paste played a major role in this.

Yep that and forking. But if you fork a repo and change a small thing, I’d it still a duplicate of the other repo?

I don’t think the raw number is what’s so impressive, as much as the fact that there’s more code public on GitHub than I could comprehend in a lifetime.

I am waiting for the results showing how much copy pasta is on the plate.

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