Isn't the urban legend around this that it mimics the "EAT ME" and "DRINK ME" messages from Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll?
The missing space is probably from UNIX preferences.
README files is the first thing I read in any source code repository. I’m noticing a trend of less useful readmes in projects. Often they are bare or provide outdated and incorrect information. This makes the introduction to the source code harder, and increases the barrier for new contributors.
This made me feel very old. Too me it’s 100% logical and not a mystery - while I fully understand that it’s super-weird for people born after 1990
I remember this for other informational text files going back to the 90s. The caps made it stand out in the list of files so it was easier to find first.
Another example is FILE_ID.DIZ. Just learned the extension is for description in zipfile.
Initially in the 1980s it was to distinguish it visually from the other entries in the directory to make it more likely it is the first file a newbie will read.
This one seems pretty obvious to those of us around computers and BBS and FTP in the nineties. On a side note, I made the pinky-thumb phone gesture to my 10 year old daughter a few days ago, and she didn't have a clue... Nor does she understand how my music collection plays without the internet. She just assumes my hacker skills have reached such level of Zen nirvana actual internet access is just a trifling detail and not a requirement.
I remember the MS-DOS variations.. README.DOC (before .DOC applied only to MS Word files), README.TXT, READ.ME, README.1ST, README.NOW...
It's a coincidence I just looked at that Q&A a couple nights ago. I had never heard of the "HACKING" file before but I like it. Is there a list somewhere of commonly used README-esque files used in open source projects?
I worked for a French company in the 90s and the 8.3 dos name was LISEZMOI.1ER
Incidentally, the answer "So it appears first when sorted by ASCII (where capital letters appear before small letters)" is insufficient - not only would "Readme" be sorted pretty close to "README", but LICENSE, COPYING, INSTALL, BUGS, CONTRIBUTING, AUTHORS, NEWS would all end up even before it.
Does anyone know how to get en_US.UTF-8 sorting with diaeresis and stuff while still keeping capitalized stuff up front? I use LC_COLLATE=C to get this, but then diaeresis don't sort correctly.
I tried to hack my way around fixing this a few years ago, but after many hours gave up.
README.TXT or README.1ST have been used for a long time distributing software, I'm assuming it's just to follow that trend. FILE_ID.DIZ files were all caps as well.
Randomly Explains Ambiguous Development Methodologies Endlessly
I still habitually use README.txt and/or README.md even though none of my environments require the upper case.
README.TXT vs README.MD:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/8655937/what-is-the-diff...
One example of a situation when the answer "It is the way it is because this is the way it is" is correct.
Huh, I always assumed it was because upper case characters come before lower case ones, but in the temporal sense. Just a holdover from the days before lower case was an option, like FORTRAN was for a while.
The sorting trick is neat, though.
LC_COLLATE=C is still something I set on my linux installs.
all caps is (was?) typically considered SHOUTING so README gets your attention
> Avoid using more complicated markup languages like HTML in the README file, however, because it should be convenient to read on a text-only terminal
And that's what README.md files from these days hardly can follow on Github.
I kinda thought it was because it was easy to tab autocomplete.
Weren't all file names all caps at one point?
It was an act of desperation. People wouldn't read docs or sanely named information, so people would jokingly title something "readme" or "important" or "mefirst". It was kind of seen as pathetic originally, to have to be so bad at your job you needed to include a README file. Those were much more arrogant times. I still remember seeing repos that actually said it was a good idea to have a README file in them and being bemused.
Now I love them, but I've grown to love simple, "dumb" solutions.
I use README.org (emacs). Sadly, npmjs.com doesn’t consider it as a readme file.
And LICENSE has no file type!
People forget the simtel20 archives, with its 00_INDEX.TXT and AAAREADME.TXT
I also use 0README.txt so it show up first when sorting by name.
As an aside, Neal Stephenson wrote a book called REAMDE
Because really it should have been ReAdMeGoDDaMMiT so people rtfm :)
I worked with a rather conservative person who didn't like "README" as he thought that computers should never be aggressive or yell at their pilots. Smart guy, but had some strange tendencies.
I can see the first guy writing a README , so desperate because people would ask obvious questions ignoring a file called readme:)
The degree to which this is so pervasive and standard--so much so that Github renders your README by default--is kind of an artifact of the open source movement. Which also brought a lot of similar standardized files, as the need came up (LICENSE, COPYING, INSTALL, CONTRIBUTING, etc.).
During the sharing, hacking, free software period it was a lot less standard and I saw plenty of alternate casing for README and "non-standard" spellings like 00README, Readme_first, etc. When everyone started sharing their open source projects in a standard way (Github and its ilk, along with the rise of CTAN/CPAN-like registries for all kind software) the notion of the standard README got a lot more... standard.