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Text editing hates you too (2019)

lord.io

81–90 of 187 posts

Re: Text editing hates you too (2019)

#81
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

?srekaeps hsilgne-non lla rof sdrawkcab txet lla ekam ot si noitulos ruoy oS

> ?srekaeps hsilgne-non lla rof sdrawkcab txet lla ekam ot si noitulos ruoy oS So you just said all non-English speakers use right-to-left? No, the direction isn't what's confusing me, rather the fact you're trying to score a cheap outrage comment, but actually wrote non-sense no matter which direction you read it. How about maybe educate yourself a little, and rephrase your question to reflect reality, and we can ha…

Okay, well sorry I was being snarky, so let me try to be a bit more serious.

You are proposing that we teach millions-billions of people a new way to write, rather than teach a few hundred thousand at most how to write computer programs that accommodate existing ways of writing.

Like maybe you underestimate how genuinely ridiculously hard of a problem it is to get billions of people to do anything! It would take literal decades of work by multiple governments and unimaginable amounts of money! Getting 10 people to agree on a favorite programming language is hard enough. Teaching a city full of kids a new way to multiply numbers takes 1000s of hours of prep, planning, syllabus development etc. by teachers. Just imagine how much harder this is.

Certainly I can see how nice it would be if the whole world used the same date format, same language, same metric system etc.

But from a practical point of view, making systems to accommodate the way people do things is 1000s of times cheaper and easier than getting them all to change.

Re: Text editing hates you too (2019)

#82
post #4

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

Wasn't there a post or (most probably) a comment recently (within a month or so) with an iceberg chart? It looked very much like this site, but I can't find the right subject. Someone even commented that one of the best links in the chart was to a fictional story on the site itself. For the life of me I can't recall what the subject of the iceberg was, except that I think it was technology related, but I did spend several hours digging through all the links.

Re: Text editing hates you too (2019)

#83

> 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. 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?

Re: Text editing hates you too (2019)

#84
post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems to be the ideal occasion to show off my latest pet project: https://icebergcharts.com

Wasn't there a post or (most probably) a comment recently (within a month or so) with an iceberg chart? It looked very much like this site, but I can't find the right subject. Someone even commented that one of the best links in the chart was to a fictional story on the site itself. For the life of me I can't recall what the subject of the iceberg was, except that I think it was technology related, but I did spend se…

Ah, found it in search. It was this one:

The Cursed Computer Iceberg Meme

https://suricrasia.online/iceberg/

Re: Text editing hates you too (2019)

#85
post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems to be the ideal occasion to show off my latest pet project: https://icebergcharts.com

Wasn't there a post or (most probably) a comment recently (within a month or so) with an iceberg chart? It looked very much like this site, but I can't find the right subject. Someone even commented that one of the best links in the chart was to a fictional story on the site itself. For the life of me I can't recall what the subject of the iceberg was, except that I think it was technology related, but I did spend se…

Yep, that's where I got my inspiration (and some CSS) from, and I also link to it in the footer on my site: https://suricrasia.online/iceberg/ :)

Re: Text editing hates you too (2019)

#86

You know, every text editing system I've seen that knocks off word (has those "bold", "italic", etc.) selectors has something anomalous in how selections are handled.

Yes! So much this. I usually wish they'd just give me markdown or similar and only convert after I'm done. Slack is a prominent offender there.

Re: Text editing hates you too (2019)

#87
post #4

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.

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?

Re: Text editing hates you too (2019)

#88
post #66

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…

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?

Re: Text editing hates you too (2019)

#89
post #66

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…

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.

Re: Text editing hates you too (2019)

#90
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think if you’re reaching for _brainfuck_ as one of the solutions for the prevalence of English in programming; then you’ve probably failed. A few of the languages on the list are designed precisely to be unreadable.

my link contains programming languages based on Arabic, Chinese, etc, not just unreadable esolangs

Let’s face it. Your link defeats your own point.
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