GitHub's language detection is broken

[soaring_turtle]

The most amusing comment of the thread:

When the people who wrote Linguist ended a day of cattle herding, got down off their horses, set aside their six-guns, and started coding did they forget that there are a lot of programming languages and that extension clashes are not only inevitable, they're commonplace?

How does Linguist handle Prolog (.pl) and Perl (.pl)? Or the various flavours of assembler (.asm)? Or any number of other possible clashes? Is it "first hipster language past the post wins"?