The early days of UNIX definitely suffered from developers acting as though they had to pay for every character they typed. See command names such as "ls" and "rm".
It may have been a reflection of use of paper-based terminals, such as thermal printers, or of slow communication speeds. At 110 baud I resented every wasted character. I can see saving characters as a reason for picking a name in the 1970's or even 1980's, but I'm questioning why "LICENSE" is preferred over "LICENSE.txt" in 2011, with broadband, large screens, and modern keyboards. If I could be sure the only reason for the preference for "LICENSE" is the typing non-issue, I would definitely support adding ".txt". Patricia On 6/14/2011 1:43 PM, Gregg Wonderly wrote:
I just remember this arguments in other circles about README and other such files. I agree that it seems implausible, given the simply disputable facts such as typing speed etc. For README, I heard the "too much typing" from UNIX people who just seemed to be hating on the Windows users who just wanted to click the darn file.
