Rob Pike: the origin of dotfiles
The author's gripe seems to be that the hiding of dotfiles was unintended, ergo dotfiles are Bad. Whether they were intended is irrelevant; their wide usage vindicates the practice. After all, traction = value. The problem of program state/configuration/metadata storage is adequately met by dotfiles.<p>There are, no doubt, numerous unintended behaviors of programs. Most of these are simply ignored and certainly not leveraged the way the dot behavior is.<p>People don't go out of their way to abuse an unintended system behavior; they simply leverage all capabilities of a system ("intended" or not) to meet their needs. Had dotfiles not gained traction, some other solution would have been designed (or "engineered") to meet the needs of program state/configuration/metadata storage.<p>[Tangent: All of this reminds me of grammar freaks that harp on "correct" usage, completely oblivious to the fact that grammar changes, and "correct" is merely a lightweight pointer to the current norm.]