Programming language file extensions that match ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 country codes

speckx 47 points 21 comments July 24, 2026
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Discussion Highlights (9 comments)

yeputons

I thought Ruby uses .rb (not .ru), and Scala uses .scala (not .sc).

cachius

I love random associations between different concepts! And that the page title becomes 'Michaelsoft Teams' when inactive <3

jl6

We must prepare for the possibility of a malicious secession of Exeter City, likely with Chris Martin as president.

internet_points

Try also wget https://iso639-3.sil.org/sites/iso639-3/files/downloads/iso-639-3.tab grep -xFf <(grep -o ^... iso-639-3.tab) /usr/share/dict/british-english You can make whole English sentences out of ISO 639-3 language codes: woo yes, any fun car has the big dry cat, and thy ads are zen too; bye! using the codes of Manombai Nyankpa Anyin Fulniô Galibi_Carib Haisla Chitwania_Tharu Biangai Darai Catalan Ansus Tha Adamorobe_Sign_Language Western_Arrarnta Zenaga Xicotepec_De_Juárez_Totonac Pouye

inigyou

Isn't ruby .RB? And why have I not seen loads an loads of .py domains for python? Paraguay is a stable enough country for this purpose. Do they limit domain names to residents?

zabzonk

Bah, people who use .CC or .cc for C++ files deserve to be beaten about the head with a baseball bat. It's not clever.

andy_parhelia

.sh is Saint Helena? I always assumed it was just "shell". Are there any file extensions on the list that are technically country codes but nobody actually uses them for the country?

weinzierl

Back in the day pl was a real problem. It was and is the conventional extension for the Perl programming language, and Perl was most popular for server side (CGI) scripts for some time. At same time the idea that webserver and user agent should negotiate the most suitable form of content was all the rage. Little of that survived (compression algorithm) but it used to be used for language as well. Apache had the convention to use the two letter language code as file extension to encode the language. For example it shipped with collection of error messages in many languages, e.g. 404.html.pl. Since this conflicted with Perl CGI scripts, Perl got .plx for Perl Executable in Apache and it was proposed as the official Perl extension, but did not stick.

bch

.tk[0] (e.g. a component of a Tcl/Tk[1] (or perhaps Perl/Tk, or Python/Tkinter) belongs to Tokelau[2]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.tk [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tk_(software) [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokelau

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