131–140 of 187 posts
So I guess I just want to say: things get complex, really fast, and a little humility goes a long long way.
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> 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…
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 people who are different as edge cases to be optimized away.
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.
It most commonly afflicts organizations with management that insists upon KISS interactions from their direct reports, but then micromanages the details when the going gets tough (scrutiny from higher layers). Some of the more common phrases you will hear in these interactions is, "I don't understand why this has to be so complex", or "Give me the 50 thousand meter/foot summary". They elevate their mental model of the domain to a level where they cannot resolve the granular details.
Analogous to the lack of optical resolution of any telescopes (including Hubble) we have to see the American flag on the moon [1]. You need a very massive bandwidth (the telescope diameter) to resolve those details, but then you trade off for increased processing time (analogy breaks down here).
Surprised Pikachu when they drill down, and the requirements explode in complexity. With most successful, highly-refined systems, it isn't the primary requirement that should be the focus of planning (Microsoft Word is just a text editor, how hard can it be!?). It is all of the 1% of features 1% of the market/stakeholders want that deliver 80% of the value proposition of the system to them. Stacked together, all those "corner cases" add up the value of the overall system, and add up the complexity. It isn't just a heap of features binned together; the team has to make sense of how it all fits together.
[1] http://curious.astro.cornell.edu/about-us/45-our-solar-syste...
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This seems to be the ideal occasion to show off my latest pet project: https://icebergcharts.com
For someone not overly ear to the ground culturally this is a rabbit hole. The Youtube one fascinates me. I've not heard of most but imagine there are hundreds of interesting stories behind every item. Interesting work and concept. Well done.
Over the course of my life and in my thirties especially, I've watched a lot of movies.
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No, it doesn't, and no, it isn't. As much as some people like to pretend it doesn't exist, accidental complexity is a thing, and reducing it is part of our job. Also, there are ways of removing complexity of processes before they are turned into software, but that requires talking with people and agreeing. Not every program has to do everything.
>accidental complexity is a thing Of course it is, in fact it is pretty much all-pervasive in our field, even in very successful software companies - which makes me question whether removing it is as valuable as people make it out to be.
You can spend 5 years customizing off the shelf ERP software to do insane things because John in accounting and Jane in HR won't budge from weird processes they built over the decades... Or you can use that opportunity for business transformation, simplify their processes and their program, save money, reduce errors, improve responsiveness and timeliness, and generally make it a win win win.
Not all complexity can be reduced of course. I can imagine self driving cars, rocket science, etc are all about critical edge cases.
But when it comes to business, and particularly back office processes (where a huge amount of IT goes) , a lot of complexity is unnecessary. Each company each department each person is certain they are special, unique, and their requirements are paramount and unchangeable. But if you move around a bit you'll come to believe otherwise.
Having touched adjacent technologies to this as well, I could not shake the feeling that text editing on the web, and WYSIWYG text editors especially, would be very well served by some sort of common understanding and agreement of output given certain inputs. As alluded to in the article, the devil really is in the details in this domain. When one knows what to look for, most rich text inputs really miss the mark in…
Ugh, no no no no no. Modes like this are the opposite of making sense. Highlight something, and press paste - of course it is a replacement of the highlighted text, because that's what pasting does.
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." And it'll work one way on Jupyter notebooks and another on Slack and I can guarantee you that all of them will confuse my screenreader and I'll spend 5 minutes trying to fix whatever stupid web stuff just happened.
No modes.
> 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…
> Nostalgia for the simplicity of the past ends up having ugly cultural implications
Or maybe people's instinctive nostalgia is correct and the artificial culture of postmodern globalism actually sucks.