I was tempted to include a linguistic example.

-ant isn't a productive suffix in English. conformant, abberant, etc. are vestiges of a dead morphological convention. 

Yet that didn't stop most of the tech industry from converging on 'performant' and using it every day, and looking at prescriptivists strangely when they say it isn't a word. ;)

-Edward


On Mon, Apr 21, 2014 at 11:56 AM, Brandon Allbery <allbery.b@gmail.com> wrote:

On Mon, Apr 21, 2014 at 11:53 AM, Alexander Berntsen <alexander@plaimi.net> wrote:
> If we do this, over time we'll save another 60+ packages the
> trouble of doing the same thing.
This looks pragmatic now, but I, for one, think that in the future we
would be appreciative of our decision to stick to conventions instead
of giving in to the slippery slope of myopic pragmatism.

Descriptivism vs. prescriptivism. Somehow, prescriptivism never seems to work out in the long run; people do what they do. If they're added as mif etc., I expect those 60+ later packages will break out as 2 using the official ones and 58+ using homegrown ifM etc. still because their authors didn't notice the "weird names" ones.


--
brandon s allbery kf8nh                               sine nomine associates
allbery.b@gmail.com                                  ballbery@sinenomine.net
unix, openafs, kerberos, infrastructure, xmonad        http://sinenomine.net

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