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> That gives you a "global naming of things" problem, which is surprisingly hard. Who controls the namespace? Who gets to define new identifiers? Do they end up as intellectual property barriers where company A can't write software to work with files of company B?

Well, you could go the sqlite route: if you want the DB to be globally accessible for everyone else, pass an absolute path; if you want it to be anonymous and for your temporary usage only, pass ":memory:" as the DB path.

Additionally, UUIDs / ULIDs / what-have-you can be extended but IMO just make 512-bit global identifiers the norm and say "screw it" for the next 1_000 - 100_000 years. (While making a standard library to work with those IDs baked in every popular OS's kernel).

Sure, it might get complicated. Still, let it be one complicated thing on one specific topic. Still a better future status quo compared to what we have today.

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I mean, nobody here seems to claim that changing things will be instantly easier and stuff will automagically fall in place in a year. No reasonable person claims that.

But freeing us from the "everything is strings on shell" and the "zero conventions" conundrums themselves will probably solve like 50% of all technical problems in programming and system/network administration.

(While we're at it, we should redefine what the hell a "shell" even is.)



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