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Text editing hates you too (2019)

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Re: Text editing hates you too (2019)

#91

Post by Groxx »

qsort wrote: post #67
hannasanarion wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Especially since the text editor in question is `ed`, which is not exactly a pinnacle of utility. We're really comparing apples to moon rockets here.

`ed` was developed in 1969. That's a remarkably uncharitable take, considering `ed` itself and its derivatives (like `sed`) are still useful today.

This is accurate in the same way as saying "a rock chiseled into a wheel with a stick as an axle is still useful today". Or maybe "a mechanical calculator and a book of logarithms is still useful today".

Sure, it still exists and still does what it used to do, and its derivatives surround us. But nobody does that any more because nearly everything else is so superior, it'd be ridiculous to do so, except as an art piece or when you literally have no alternative.

Re: Text editing hates you too (2019)

#92

Post by edoceo »

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?

What? IME removing complexity removes costs. That's a good choice. I can't think of a case where it didn't happen. Of course this only works for the removable complexity, which is discovered through analysis (possibly iterative/recursive)

Re: Text editing hates you too (2019)

#93

Post by shard »

brulard wrote: post #53
crazygringo wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pride doesn't even matter here. It's simple economics. It's far less effort and cost for developers to accomodate the world's existing scripts, than it is for the vast majority of the world's population to re-learn how to read and write a new script. By orders of magnitude. And obviously, it's not just direction that differs from English but a whole host of other aspects as well.

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

There is an issue with that just like with programming languages. Do we want to standardize on one programming language for all use cases? Because they have different expressiveness and core concepts, not all programming languages are the best fit for all situations (consider assembly versus TensorFlow). Similarly, different human languages have different core concepts, and express them differently (for example, English has a stronger emphasis on time branches, with all the different tenses, while Korean has a stronger emphasis on relations, with all the very specific words for different members of the family and politeness levels). If they are replaced with one language, that expressiveness would be lost.

Re: Text editing hates you too (2019)

#94

Post by alistairw »

slmjkdbtl wrote: post #83
colllectorof wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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?

I agree with the sentiment you're getting at about nostalgia for the past sometimes ignores the homogeneity of the people using those systems and how that reduced complexity. I do think there's an argument there that needs to be explored further to identify what is actually simple and hard/complex in computing.

However, I think this point about how JB specifically would make one with any type of character is not the best direction for exploring that. He's made games and his own presentation software (Used in the presentation linked above) which is able to do that. I doubt he would classify that as one of the actually hard aspects of computing.

Re: Text editing hates you too (2019)

#95

Post by alex_smart »

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.…

>The programmer would have had to miss something architecturally up front for that to be the case. It happens, but it's not that common.

It is very, very common indeed. Seldom is software created with all the requirements and complexities of the problem known upfront. In fact, very often the process of development of the software itself reveals all the different ways in which the original specifications were imprecise and not completely thought through. And new features and requirements get added onto later all the time.

Software is created in an iterative process of feedback and development. At each stage, the programmers takes the shortest, most straightforward approach to solve the problem. When the programmers are not careful (or just lazy) they inadvertently add dependencies that shouldn't exist and make the whole thing more complex. Of course, any single infraction seems innocent enough, but eventually you almost always end up with software that is much more complex than it needs to be.

Here is a talk on how software is too complex all the way from 2006. I am more than confident that the problem has only gotten worse in last 15 years.

https://www.kernel.org/doc/ols/2006/ols2006v1-pages-441-450....

Re: Text editing hates you too (2019)

#96

Post by ratww »

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?

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.

Re: Text editing hates you too (2019)

#97

Post by peoplefromibiza »

colllectorof wrote: post #60
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…

>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…

upvote and a giant thanks!

this video should be mandatory in every school on the Planet.

Re: Text editing hates you too (2019)

#99

Post by fallingfrog »

I suppose the latex approach is one way to make some of this easier. The document is plaintext, just some letters snd symbols and all the formatting and fonts etc is specified explicitly through typed codes. So that solves the problem of invisible boldface characters and line breaks. I always thought it bothersome how latex worked but it does make some amount of sense to separate content from presentation.

Doesn’t help with internationalization though.

Re: Text editing hates you too (2019)

#100

Post by josephg »

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?

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 invention of program libraries, high level languages and compilers, HTTP and JSON, tcp/ip (replacing custom transmission protocols), and there’s lots more. Calculus and the Arabic numeral system are examples in mathematics. (It’s insanely difficult to multiply using Roman numerals!)

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