171–180 of 187 posts
Yeah text editing is hard. I've yet to find a Linux console editor that can do word wrapping smoothly yet preserve the normal line endings. Basically what the textbox on every GUI browser does right out of the box. It seems to be a very difficult ask.
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If you want to delete the highlighted text, then why not press backspace or delete? Those already have the explicit action you're looking for. >> Now, we want highlighting something and pasting to contextually mean "insert markup specific to some markup language, after parsing what's on the clipboard and deciding that it looks like another part of that markup language." Not really sure what you're trying to say. You…
The problem here is “you can’t quickly make a link in our wysiwyg”. Screwing paste is not a correct answer to that. Let it detect that a clipboard text is a link and tooltip-hint a user that they can combine it with a selection by pressing ctrl-alt-v, or something similar. Nobody is against your easy editing, but not at the cost of a cognitive overload. I wish UI/UX designers read some books on how human mind works o…
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>Nostalgia for the simplicity of the past ends up having ugly cultural implications. 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". This is a ridiculous mischaracterization of what Jonathan Blow was talking about. Here is the full presentation. Very much worth watching in its entirety and think…
> This is a ridiculous mischaracterization of what Jonathan Blow was talking about. I watched the full presentation and agree with almost everything he said, but I can't find a part matching the conflict between "Simple text editor Vs. Complicated character encoding scheme / rendering / formatting". How would JB make a text editor that works with any kind of character?
Could some parts be re-written to be more efficient? Maybe. Could they be made efficient and still be easy for any of those hundreds of programmers to follow and modify? Probably not, even if all of them were of his caliber.
Games just don't have to deal with the same issues. Take Unicode fonts. Just the emoji font is 221meg! I'm pretty sure if you ask JBlo about it he'll give some flippant and asian bashing "emoji shouldn't exist in the first answer". He won't actually "solve the problem that's actually being solved", he'll solve some simpler problem in a simpler way in his head and then declare that's all you need.
He's made all kinds of ridiculous and conflicting claims. Example, he believes there should be only one graphics API. To put it another way, he believes in design by committee since that's the only way there would ever be one API. Yet in other areas he rejects design by committee (game engines would be one).
Another issue is security. AFAICT he's never given it a second thought. As one example his JAI language he pointed out he never runs into memory ownership issues so he doesn't want a language that helps with that. Memory ownership issues is one of the top ways security bugs appear. Again, pointing out he doesn't know what problems are actually being solved and is thinking only from his own limited experience.
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I see it the other way. It would be actually orders of magnitude less effort for the rest of the world to learn one standard system/language than to have every app/product/document adapted to every single language/script/whatever in existence
That's just factually untrue. The percentage of the world population involved in script adaptation and language translation is really quite tiny. Consumers vastly, vastly, vastly outnumber producers. Not to mention that we have things like automated translation that are "good enough" for many cases as well. Whereas learning a new language to fluency, for most adults, takes about ten years.
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> the advantages VASTLY, and I mean VASTLY have outweighed the short-term drawbacks. Except you're not even including the value of diversity in your argument. "Unity" also leads to groupthink and monocultures which are less resistant to new challenges. Unity comes with costs you're ignoring. Languages aren't just an encoding, but an entire paradigm of thinking. Eradicating linguistic differences eradicates entire per…
Languages aren’t paradigms of thinking. We borrow phrases and concept from each other at a higher level, they’re basically identical, unless you’re isolated on an island and don’t interact with anyone. For proof, look up the etymology of a random set of words. They come from all over the world. This is literally pride over encodings. It’s superficial, petty, and ignorance makes it seem profound and important.
I speak two languages fluently and they really are two different modes of thinking. That's why translation is an art, not a science, and for literary stuff it's quite difficult.
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> utf-8 is dangerously compatible with ASCII This. My name is Kayodé Lycaon. Note the é... how many places don’t support it? Some people consider names to be sacred and changing the spelling is more than a little offensive. Even UTF-8 can’t represent all characters in use. I believe there are Japanese names that can’t be represented by its character set. I get it’s technically difficult but so many places treat peopl…
UTF-8 can represent any Unicode code point. If there is a character that it can’t represent, then that’s because that character is not encoded in Unicode; it has nothing to do with UTF-8 itself.
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This feature conflicts with whitespace-at-line-end rules, because if your editor truncates ws at eol, it must account for multiline string literals in a generic way, and if it doesn’t, everyone else editing that file has to deal with ················’s scattered randomly all over the text/code/diffs. Especially when “·” renders as as “ ” instead, and pressing the End key turns into a lottery. I can see ways for this…
I don't see why this is so. I like auto removal of trailing space, I don't see why you can't combine that feature and virtual space. Virtual space just means the cursor/caret moves strictly vertically as you press the up/down keys even as you visit lines that are shorter than the current offset from the left margin. If you alight at such a line and start typing text, the editor simply inserts sufficient spaces to ext…
Auto-removal of trailing space is only possible if the trailing space is meaningless. Many programming languages have meaningful trailing spaces which cannot be removed. The most common example is inside multi-line strings.
In that case, the modifier should be displayed at the end of the preceding line, as newlines are generally associated with the line they are ending, not with the subsequent line.
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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.
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.
"Some can manage to get the thing done by avoiding the complexity, geniuses remove the complexity for everyone"
For people involved with technology I think this is a perfect response to "how hard can it be" - no matter if they're discussing how to keep toilet paper stocked or why cURL can be replaced with five lines of shell script - it emphatically shows how complicated something apparently simple can be once you start diving into it.
This seems to be the ideal occasion to show off my latest pet project: https://icebergcharts.com
https://gizmodo.com/youre-drawing-icebergs-all-wrong-1846329... https://joshdata.me/iceberger.html