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This 'lewellyn' person seems to be complaining about the lack of support for the language Limbo, a language for the Inferno OS. Both seem quite outdated and out of use. He also complains about how Github is focusing on 'cool' kid languages. Which I am guessing refer to modern, popular languages (If this is the definition of cool, then yes, they are.) Which, if I was Github, I would do the same. It's called priorities. I kind of get the vibe that lewellyn is some kind of 'hiptser'. His obscure language is better than the 'cool' kids simply because he's using it. I also would phrase it as "GitHub's language detection is broken", it's merely missing a feature/language.

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I suspect his - rather labored - point is that there are multiple use cases to show that the design of Linquist's configuration is flawed as a rule and not an exception, and the lack of attention paid to this particular issue is perhaps indicative of a more general Github attitude towards the less trendy languages and technologies out there.

Which I think is an uncharitable way of saying "Github prioritizes working on things that will impact the most people."

From my reading of the issue it seems that he's complaining about a limitation of the tool Linguist. There's a suggested fix that doesn't, as far as I can tell, involve changing how Inferno code is written. My understanding is that primary_extension is simply used to short circuit analysis when it's unique to a language. In this case if the primary extension was .inferno and .m was in other extensions it seems that the sample code would be used by the classifier to distinguish between inferno, MATLAB, and obj-c.

To me this comes off as assuming the worst intentions on behalf of the github developers.

> My understanding is that primary_extension is simply used to short circuit analysis when it's unique to a language.

No, the primary_extension is only used in a gists_helper.rb file outside the Linguist repos. Note that the feature is deprecated anyway.

https://github.com/github/linguist/blob/master/lib/linguist/...

Nobody's arguing that GitHub shouldn't prioritize popular languages. I don't think that the responses to this pull request show 'prioritization' however, they show incompetence and close-mindedness instead.

More likely a lack of time. If you'd like to see it fixed, start contributing to the fix.

Do you mean, a fix like https://github.com/github/linguist/pull/985?

A lack of time doesn't cause problems with multiple languages that only use the trivial ".m" extension. Bad design does.

Luckily I use languages popular enough to be classified correctly.

Yeah, kind of a self-important hipster too.

> Basically, Github needs to be accepting of programmers of all stripes, or they are destined to be irrelevant (or at least doing lots of scrambling) once the trendy kids move on from the trendy things they're doing and the currently-popular languages start falling out of style with a reversion to a previous status quo. Github needs to accept that there is a vast wealth of code out there which predates it and which will easily postdate it.

Okay there, buddy. I don't think lack of Lingo support is going to be GitHub's eventual downfall.

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