phaker

> the code for each language is clearly different.

It's always the case. That's why writing them is interesting.

> The page is more of a dictionary of language constructs.

Which would come incredibly useful if you wanted to write a polyglot program.

Why else would you use a reference like this? If you wanted to learn a language, or had to hack something in a language you don't know, you'll be better off using resources specific to given language(s).

The site doesn't mention which meaning of "polyglot" the people behind it had in mind.

I assumed it was for people writing "polyglot" toy programs, because it'd be very useful resource.

I very rarely encounter uses of the term "polyglot" referring to people knowing large number of programming languages, so I didn't think of this use. Looking at it now, from this perspective, I have to say that I don't think it would be useful for these people, not enough depth.

> do a few easily duplicated UI difference really justify billions?

A large (paying) customer base would. But, just like johnrob, I'm not sure dropbox has that many users.

You can't create 'idiomatic polyglots'. You just hack things together until they sorta work, for more than few languages this basically involves large strings and lots of backslashes, or base64 or something like that. (Writing a polyglot that does something more clever is obviously much better style, but it's incredibly hard.)

'rename' uses arbitrary perl expressions, including regexes. from the manpage:

  rename 's/\.bak$//' *.bak

You really, really should use 'set -e' which will exit if there are any errors. Otherwise if 'bar' doesn't exist, you'll 'do something' in a wrong directory and frobnicate something you didn't want frobnicated.

> For reference, daytime sunlight is around 5500k— these bulbs are marketed as 2700k, which is about the color of sunset, sunrise, or a large fire.

Cold light will mess up your sleep patterns:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circadian_rhythm#Light_and_the_...

(unfortunately I can't find a better source)