[pjhyett]

People were already using the @ notation in their code comments, so it seemed like the logical way to offer additional functionality without anyone changing their behavior.

[thwarted]

Of course, github is just making work the things that people were already doing. But ~user predates twitter even for referring to users.

[pjhyett]

No disagreement there: http://github.com/~pjhyett

(That's legacy from the earliest days of github and I can't promise it'll be around forever, but it still makes me smile being able to do it)

[thwarted]

It's "legacy" Apache mod_userdir. :) I think nsca used it by default before that and inherited it from the shell expansions.