layer8

WIMP is fine. The problem at present is that “modern” UIs don’t adhere to WIMP conventions (tooltips, context menus, regular menus, keyboard accelerators/shortcuts and navigation, using native lo…

> You cannot even interchange documents between Word and LaTeX in an easy automated round trip way AFAIK. Word is a horrible format too, which explains why conversion is problematic in both directi…

Agree. Having to use modifiers for the arrows and function keys etc. gives me worse RSI than having to move my hand back and forth a bit. Thumb modifiers are also bad for me, as my thumb joints seem p…

It’s bad for IDEs and Excel etc. where you often already have one or two modifiers plus F-key.

“Meaning” is just a construct in your head. What we perceive as “meaningful” is shaped by our biological and cultural evolution, a byproduct if you will. “Meaningfulness” is not something that exists …

I’m aware of the trade-offs. :) I’d rather use a digraph operator for mutating assignment, again with the Huffman coding argument. One design I’m thinking of is using “@” as the mutable qualifier (e.g…

One thing V gets right is not requiring a keyword (e.g. “let”) for initializing an immutable variable. This is such a common operation that it should be as compact and non-visual-noisy as possible (Hu…

Good point. Even before C99, I would be using C++ as a “better C” for reasons like that.

Even if they don’t read (software) documentation at first, it’s good to have something to point them to when a question or issue comes up. After that happens a couple of times, some may even learn tha…

That’s really the best formulation, in addition, of course, to “start from the inside“.

> how do you comment out a region with comments inside? s/^/\/\// Or just Ctrl+/ in some IDEs. That’s also better than multiline comments because it provides indentati…

It’s a mystery to me why is:open is the default. In most situations you also want any existing “closed” matches to be listed in the results.

It often feels to me that it’s the submission titles that get voted up, not the actual content of the linked articles.

I’m using a search shortcut that just adds “-pinterest” to all searches (and also activates Google verbatim search mode).

A better formulation of DRY is SPOT — Single Point Of Truth. In the event that the logic is changed in one copy, should the other copy always be updated accordingly? If the answer is yes, combine them…

> One problem with the name-based systems is that developers don't actually use the VCS rename operation. That’s a matter of tooling. In languages and environments where using an IDE is the no…

The banners are an opportunity to have the user consent to more than they would otherwise consent to (“allow all”).

> Why not just let browsers control who sets what cookies? Browsers wouldn’t fall for dark patterns.

12/16 is tiling WM day. (Let’s do this.)

Some systems (used to) map the local part to local unix usernames, which are case-sensitive. Hence the sender would get a 550 No such user (or similar) if he got the case of the local part wrong.

> SAML is the only mainstream user of XMLDSIG That’s not quite accurate. XMLDSIG is widely used in SOAP, and also in the European XAdES signature standard (which is an extension of XMLDSIG).

The important thing with default parameters, if you have separate compilation, is that they are fixed in the callee and not in the caller. Otherwise, when the default value is changed, previously comp…

I don‘t really see a significant difference between overloaded methods and a single method with a sum type (where, in the general case, the sum is over the parameter-list tuple types of the overloaded…

> In what other programming language can you put spaces in variable names? In SQL, notably. Such identifiers need to be quoted, of course.

> It's not that these books are bad, or out of date. It's more that they exposed some new ideas at the time that, to the books credit, have been picked up and made mainstream or basic…

The following bit from the documentation [0] ("step 2") is a bit strange: > A good practice is to create and test your LAMBDA function in a cell to make sure it works correctly, including…

IMO it's a pretty obvious feature -- functional abstraction. I was wondering for years why MS wouldn't add something like that. I guess they previously thought that VBA was enough.

Macros are not “formulas in Excel”, lambdas are.

The problem with “macros” is that they can be arbitrary VBA code that can invoke OS functions and foreign applications. Lambdas can only invoke Excel functions that you can invoke anyway from any Exce…