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Text editing hates you too (2019)

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Re: Text editing hates you too (2019)

#121

Post by titzer »

pcwalton wrote: post #50

> Jonathan Blow, in a talk about how software is getting worse, points to the example of Ken Thompson's text editor, which Ken built in a single week. This kind of sentiment drives me crazy. Yes, internationalization makes things harder and more complex than they were in the old days. But, back then, only people who lived in one small part of the world were able to usefully use computers in their language. (Simply su…

> It's easy to say "let's go back to the time when things were simple"; it's a lot harder to say "folks in (e.g.) Israel shouldn't be able to type in their native language".

Is writing a text editor literally so hard that we can't do it twice (or three, or five times)?

There are literally trillions of lines of code in existence now. Instead of making a five hundred thousand line text editor because are terrified of writing one again, maybe we make five ten thousand line editors?

Of course, I'm exaggerating, but do you get my point? There are worse things than duplicated code. Narrowing the requirements for latin and cyrillic left-to-right languages so their code can be made radically simpler seems well worth it! The specialization necessary to make a text editor do Hebrew well, or Chinese or Arabic well is probably way different, and frankly, better done by experts in those languages. From their perspective, to completely flip it around, why should their editors be encumbered by the need to support English? Instead we end up with the proverbial "Jack of all trades, master of none". And we end up with radically complicated, hard to test, terrified-of-breaking-a-language-I-don't understand code that serves no one well.

Editors don't have have to completely diverge in features and feel just because they might have different code bases. Surely we can try to make copy&paste and select all and the common things operate in a fairly standard way across a few different programs.

Re: Text editing hates you too (2019)

#122

Post by josephg »

alex_smart wrote: post #110
josephg wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most things in life and programming exist on a trade off curve of goodness vs simplicity. Making the thing better means giving up simplicity. Making it simple means removing features people want. Geniuses invent new ways to get both. Those ideas permanently move the trade off curve outwards. In programming, some abstractions which have done this are: Operating systems (Abstracting away the hardware), Grace Hopper’s i…

>Operating systems (Abstracting away the hardware), Grace Hopper’s invention of program libraries, high level languages and compilers, HTTP and JSON, tcp/ip (replacing custom transmission protocols) How many of us get to work at such lofty problems though? >Calculus and the Arabic numeral system are examples in mathematics. Eye roll. Of course reducing complexity is the very essence of mathematics. Let us not pretend…

> How many of us get to work at such lofty problems though?

How many of us choose to work on such lofty problems? You can work on whatever you want, whenever you want. But lofty, unproven ideas don’t pay Google salaries. Your career is a choice, not a prison.

And of course most software engineers aren’t mathematicians. We’re talking about genius - and most of us are a long way from that. Most of us are lucky if we manage to invent a couple complexity reducing concepts in our entire careers.

But lots of great computer science ideas have “come down the mountain” from mathematics adjacent work. Functional programming wasn’t invented by C lovers like me. But I love closures, pure functions, and map / filter / reduce. This stuff makes certain problems lovely. And we wouldn’t have any of this without mathematically minded CS.

Re: Text editing hates you too (2019)

#123

Post by p1necone »

alex_smart wrote: post #88
leoc wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alan Perlis' old motivational-poster slogan "Fools ignore complexity. Pragmatists suffer it. Some can avoid it. Geniuses remove it." has a fair bit going for it.

Does that mean that Geniuses would be terrible software engineers, since removing complexity is seldom the right thing to do business-decision wise?

I think there's an unspoken implication that "complexity" refers to implementation complexity, not removing needed functionality.

Re: Text editing hates you too (2019)

#124

Post by exporectomy »

KineticLensman wrote: post #48
bombcar wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not the last time major portions of the world fundamentally changed how they did things to align with the major powers at the time. Even WITH all the Unicode support that currently exists in the computing world I don't know of a single computer language that isn't based on English in ASCII. I guess you could count APL there (or perl!).

> I don't know of a single computer language that isn't based on English in ASCII https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-English-based_programming_...

Can you honestly say you know of AxumLight / Geez#, Al-Khawarizm, Jeem or anything at all that's based on another human language? These are mostly obscure.

Re: Text editing hates you too (2019)

#125

Post by p1necone »

bsder wrote: post #79
colllectorof wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More often than not a problem that looks simple and has insane complexity once you dig a bit deeper is based on some faulty assumptions. Assumptions that either changed over time or never made sense to begin with. The wast majority of software systems out there are significantly simplifiable. However, not all developers are willing to analyze and question fundamental assumptions about systems they deal with. Most, in…

> The vast majority of software systems out there are significantly simplifiable. I think exactly the opposite, actually. Most programmers don't just write lines of code for no reason. They generally stop when the problem is solved. So, you might be able to simplify new programs, but I wouldn't put a lot of money on it. The programmer would have had to miss something architecturally up front for that to be the case.…

You must have above average programming peers. It's my experience that architectural decisions that could cut future work by orders of magnitude are quite commonly missed.

Re: Text editing hates you too (2019)

#126

Post by skybrian »

titzer wrote: post #121
pcwalton wrote: post #50

> Jonathan Blow, in a talk about how software is getting worse, points to the example of Ken Thompson's text editor, which Ken built in a single week. This kind of sentiment drives me crazy. Yes, internationalization makes things harder and more complex than they were in the old days. But, back then, only people who lived in one small part of the world were able to usefully use computers in their language. (Simply su…

> It's easy to say "let's go back to the time when things were simple"; it's a lot harder to say "folks in (e.g.) Israel shouldn't be able to type in their native language". Is writing a text editor literally so hard that we can't do it twice (or three, or five times)? There are literally trillions of lines of code in existence now. Instead of making a five hundred thousand line text editor because are terrified of w…

People who work in multiple languages probably wouldn't be too happy with this. (Particularly not with dropping English since it's the most common second language.)

This also isn't going to work economically for companies selling consumer apps because they aren't going to want to limit their market to a one country, particularly if it's a small one. There's more money in targeting the world, so programmers just have to deal. (The support matrix is often complicated already with multiple platforms to support.)

I think it's fine in many cases to target limited audiences. Companies often have internal apps that aren't internationalized. But the popular apps that we all use have to be very complicated because they actually do try to be universal.

Re: Text editing hates you too (2019)

#127

Post by B1FF_PSUVM »

blake8086 wrote: post #106
oneeyedpigeon wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love that apart from the "Some can avoid it" bit — feels out of place with the rest. Who's "some"? Pithy slogans often come in three parts rather than four; I love the overall message, I think I'd just prefer it with that 25% removed.

You're a genius.

I'd be leery of messing with Perlis, but then again, most popular quotes are misquotes. Carry on ...

Re: Text editing hates you too (2019)

#128

Post by patrickdavey »

josephg wrote: post #100
alex_smart wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does that mean that Geniuses would be terrible software engineers, since removing complexity is seldom the right thing to do business-decision wise?

Most things in life and programming exist on a trade off curve of goodness vs simplicity. Making the thing better means giving up simplicity. Making it simple means removing features people want. Geniuses invent new ways to get both. Those ideas permanently move the trade off curve outwards. In programming, some abstractions which have done this are: Operating systems (Abstracting away the hardware), Grace Hopper’s i…

I once read a book called "simplicity" by de bono I think it was...

He made the point (I think) that you do want simplicity, you don't want simplistic. That is: it should be able to do all the things you want to, but in an easy to use manner.

Worth striving for I believe.

Re: Text editing hates you too (2019)

#129

Post by maccard »

notriddle wrote: post #87
colllectorof wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More often than not a problem that looks simple and has insane complexity once you dig a bit deeper is based on some faulty assumptions. Assumptions that either changed over time or never made sense to begin with. The wast majority of software systems out there are significantly simplifiable. However, not all developers are willing to analyze and question fundamental assumptions about systems they deal with. Most, in…

> More often than not a problem that looks simple and has insane complexity once you dig a bit deeper is based on some faulty assumptions. Okay, I'll bite. What are the faulty assumptions that cause text editing widgets to be so complicated?

The number 1 assumption is that all text will meet the format you're expecting it in. Be that an encoding (everyone in the US speaks English, but utf-8 is dangerously compatible with ASCII), or a character range (do we block input of certain characters?)

Presentatuon is huge too, How do we render a pasted newline into a single line block? Where do you put the cursor if someone pastes a block of Arabic text into your multiline input? What do you display if your font doesn't have the character they've copied and pasted from another source?

There's also just the basic stuff of "every keypress/chord equals a new character" - I have an app that I use every day that renders Ctrl + backspace rather than deleting the word?

Then there's input considerations; Macos uses alt for per-word navigation, windows uses Ctrl. Do you support the OS input type, or do you support a popular editor bindings (emacs) and how do you differentiate between an input to display and an input to take a navigation from? What about mobile? Most boards support input gestures, and autocomplete suggestions. How do you know to modify your current context over appending it to your input?

Finally, what about non-renderable input? If you're modifying a rich text string, how do you escape from a block, or how do insert between two separate blocks?

Re: Text editing hates you too (2019)

#130

Post by leoc »

blake8086 wrote: post #106
oneeyedpigeon wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love that apart from the "Some can avoid it" bit — feels out of place with the rest. Who's "some"? Pithy slogans often come in three parts rather than four; I love the overall message, I think I'd just prefer it with that 25% removed.

You're a genius.

No, he's a some ...
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