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Comment by moron4hire | Hacker News Reader

what, then, is the point of the primary_extension field?

EDIT: or as I like to yell at Github for Windows when it can't revert out of a merge conflict "WHAT IS EVEN THE POINT OF YOU?!"

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It's just a design error in the original implementation where linguist assumes that the "primary_extension" for any particular language will be unique among all primary_extensions. Obviously that was a mistake, but that's where we are. The comment that set people off was perhaps poorly worded, but it was an honest suggestion to work around the design bug.

A better suggestion: fix the defect. Just delete primary_extension. At best, it does nothing that the extensions array can't do, as it doesn't appear at first glance that any check to primary_extension does not also include a check to extensions.

At worst, it is confusing to implementers and requires chicanery to work around... which is exactly the case we're in. We're in the worst case scenario for this bit of code, and there is no upside to its best-case scenario. Just delete the code.

I bet it's not as easy as "just delete the code". They will probably have to do quite a bit of refactoring to remove this, followed by a probably even larger amount of testing.

Long-term this is probably the right solution, but why go through all this trouble right now if there is a simple workaround? It seems like the only problem right now is a few people's pride.

Of course it's not that easy. They don't have a compiler with a static checker to show them all the places the field was used :P

How much you wanna bet? (https://github.com/github/linguist/issues/985)

If I'm reading this right all this does is define the first extension as the primary extension, which still has to be unique. So they would still have to use a different extension as the first one in the list, it just wouldn't be called "primary" anymore. How would this help?

There is no unicity check anymore; I just kept the first one special because some private code at GitHub seems to rely on the primary_extension property for the Gist editor. As I can't hack this (it is private), I can't remove it entirely.

There's no more requirement for it to be unique as far as I can see.

Probably if the classifier can't determine the language, it will fall back to the primary_extension field - as it should, if the classifier can't determine if a .m file is objc or mercury, it should and will default to objc.

Classification is never 100% accurate.

EDIT: Exact method that it is used is reported here: https://github.com/github/linguist/pull/748#issuecomment-374...

It's the other way around: the extension check is ran before the classifier. And given the limitations of file extensions, an extension collision is so likely of an occurrence (not most likely, but likely enough) as to not bother with primary_extension and just use the collection of extensions as a culling system to minimize the work for classification.

In other words, it seems like the overall design wouldn't be hurt too much by just extricating primary_extension completely. Best-case scenario, primary_extension is equivalent to always having at least one item in extensions. It does nothing else.

Also, this looks like a bug: "if possible_languages.length > 1 ... else possible_languages.first" What if length is 0? That's not greater than 1. I'm not familiar with Ruby, does first return null on an empty array, or does it error? LINQ in .NET has separate First<T> and FirstOrDefault<T> methods: one errors, the other returns default(T) (which is null in the case of reference types). Or is there a default match in the index that occurs when no other language is found? https://github.com/github/linguist/blob/master/lib/linguist/...

Not instilling a lot of confidence that someone really thought through this bit of code. I'm not saying I very strictly think through everything I write, but I also don't write software for thousands of users, and I acknowledge that I've grown rather complacent in terms of time spent per unit code.

I'm looking at more of this, and jesus christ, this is completely wrong: https://github.com/github/linguist/blob/master/lib/linguist/...

Code that commonly resides in .asp files is completely different from code that commonly resides in .aspx files. They are not synonyms for each other. Also, I would wager that C# aspx files are a tad more common than VB.NET aspx files.

It's even worse than lumping together .c and .cpp. You at least have some chance of getting .c files to compile in a C++ compiler. There is no chance of running ASP code through the ASP.NET engine.

This is why "ASPX" as a term exists, to differentiate from ASP.

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