I agree with you but i'd add our cultures pushed these psychological profiles (not far from mine) into running for some kind of (supposed) early safety because entering adulthood felt too bland heavy and risky.
From the few ive read about previous decades, people joined adult life earlier, with easier and better integration around adults and cheaper housing or similar needs. This creates a different existential landscape imo
I forgot the early release but ribbon seemed to have fuller keyboard shortcut and could be hidden entirely. Leaving power users with more space and faster command triggers isn't it ?
Yes, the ribbon also showed you the appropriate keyboard shortcut. My last job in the Navy involved a lot of converting mail merge-style Word docs to PDF for digital signature and so I became very adept at using keyboard shortcuts in Word and it was all right there in the ribbon.
It was different from Word 2003, but that was about all the bad you could say for it from the 'power user' perspective.
Very interesting to see guidelines for UI on such constrained devices. Also terrible realizing that functionally, my so-very-2026 css3-reactjs-tailwind app is also tabs with rows and toolbars.
Fair that it can create some. But just allowing of nested loops already creates some of these. And, I know folks have tried to disallow loops, but that feels extreme.
Again, I would point to many of Knuth's descriptions as already allowing jumps forward and backward in steps as evidence that they can be useful.
When backward jumps are allowed you can create loops that are much more tangled and incomprehensible than when you are nesting the loop structures of modern languages.
With backward jumps, you can make multiple loops that are not nested, but you could visualize them as a complex graph that has sequences of instructions in the nodes and which has multiple cycles through which the execution may or may not pass and which intersect each other. Good luck to understand how the code works, because you cannot separate parts of it that can be understood independently, like when using the "structured programming" that is ubiquitous in modern programming languages.
Such indecomposable complex multiple loops were not uncommon before 1970 in languages like FORTRAN or COBOL, and precisely this kind of control structures were the reason why the use of GOTO was criticized and considered harmful.
I said that that was a fair claim. My only point on loops is you can already get some hairy explosions with "easy" to understand loops. Since those are effectively backwards jumps already.
That said, I disagree with your idea that you can't reason about it. You are just describing a flowchart that has several arrows going in different directions. Is it as easy as a flow chart that only has arrows in one direction? Of course not. But it is doable. In fact, if you allow jumping forward out of a loop, you already have most of this.
Now, can you make one that is so complicated that it can't be understood that well? Of course you can.
I agree with your point that you can already get some hairy explosions with "easy" to understand loops.
I also agree with you that even if have not use the word "flowchart" that was what I meant, i.e. the use of unrestricted GOTO results in the most general kind of flowchart, without any constraints. I also agree that with more or less effort any flowchart, i.e. any program can be understood, but the goal of a programmer is to never make a program harder to understand than strictly necessary for solving the given problem.
My main point however, is that allowing backwards GOTO and allowing loops is not the same thing, which is the reason why Knuth in his recommendations of how to combine GOTO with structured programming and the language MESA allowed loops, but not backwards GOTO.
A loop is terminated by a backwards GOTO, but the pairs formed by the implicit label from the beginning of a loop and the backwards GOTO from the end of a loop behave like pairs of parentheses, i.e. they may only be nested and they may not be interleaved.
An arbitrary backwards GOTO does not have this restriction, i.e. it can jump in the middle of an earlier loop, which is why it can create much more complex flowcharts.
On the other hand, unlike with backwards GOTO the use of forwards GOTO makes a program more clear than any alternatives that have been proposed. For example, several languages use loop labels to enable the termination of multiple nested loops.
This is worse than with GOTO. The loop termination statement must include the label of the loop that must be terminated, e.g. it must look like "break LABEL_7" or "exit LABEL_7. This is no improvement over "goto LABEL_7".
Moreover when you try to follow the flow of control in such a program, from the loop terminating instruction you must go back, frequently to another page, because you have several levels of loops, and then from the label you must scan forward for a matching end of loop. This is significantly slower than just going from the loop terminating instruction to the point where it actually transfers the control.
My only point was that in some cases it can be easier to reason with the structured steps that go to each other. Specifically, it was far easier than I expected when I started playing with that style later in life.
It was funny, as I originally put in some labeled breaks in a tight java event loop at a big company. Every wave of new employees would try to refactor into something that didn't need that. Every wave introduced a crap ton of bugs before reverting to the labeled break.
At least in that case, I granted that it was a slightly difficult part of the program to reason about. Was doable, but still difficult. What was a huge surprise to me was how much easier it was to put together a set of steps if I wasn't trying to bend them into the control structures of most programming languages.
I suspect the big thing that made this easier for me, was that you are encouraged to have the steps such that they don't jump from the middle of the step. You have what you are going to do, then you have a choice of what to do next. If you find that you wanted to jump out from the middle of a step, you break that into two steps.
It's also repelling their own citizen. Lots of videos of people being fed up with the ambient angst in the US any time they come back from another country.
This is a thing that you don’t notice until you experience it. No more compelling argument that we’re doing something wrong as a nation than that first time stepping onto an American street after visiting a civilized country.
True, after you visit a country where the cities are entirely safe and there aren't really any bad parts, it's disheartening to return to American cities where people say: "It's really safe! Just ignore these areas, don't go out late out night, keep an eye out when you walk around, and just ignore the crazy people yelling threats at you, they probably won't do anything."
Americans really put up with low standards in a lot of areas, and it becomes obvious the more you travel.
Ironically, this sort of mindset that, eg, homelessness and drug use are weeds to be trimmed, as opposed to the output of the whole of society and the economy - that homelessness is a personal flaw, not a social failing - is why America can’t effectively tackle those issues, whereas European countries can. The state of European cities is an output of European social policies, not some odd quirk of the European people.
It’s mainly because income isn’t keeping up with rent/mortgages/healthcare/inflation etc. But there’s no collective will to solve it, the solutions are all individual, like “work harder”. But lots of people are already working 2 jobs.
It sucks to live in a society that doesn’t care about you, and many are angry, but they don’t know what to do because they were trained to hate socialism. Half this country won’t even wear a simple mask to save your life, nevermind pay Europe-style taxes.
I live in a civilized European country and gravely miss the freedom of speech I had in the USA that I don't here. I'm terrified one tweet will get me jailed for 30 months.
Considering the degree of "hate speech" a Tweet would have to contain to land someone in jail includes direct incitements of violence, I'm scared to ask what sort of opinion you'd like to share that you feel you legally cannot.
The claim that you get thrown in jail in London "just for sharing your opinion" is a myth, unless your opinion is, "round up everyone of race X, put them in a hotel, and burn the hotel down."
the amount of people arrested for online activity in England is not the best example to use if you're arguing that such events are rare.
otherwise, your incredulity to such a belief is why the far-right continues to gain a constituency in Europe and elsewhere. so instead of dismissing the concern, which fuels the far-right, you could just acknowledge it is a real thing people are experiencing, and that it doesn't help a liberal free society to criminalize thoughts that are unsavory to the political elite.
The "real thing people are experiencing" is posting unambiguous hate speech or calls for violence, and then getting in legal trouble for it. Calling it "online activity" or "just sharing their opinion online" is the actual blatant misrepresentation of what's happening on the ground, akin to saying someone robbing a store was "jailed merely for getting food for dinner that night."
It's a strange economical morbid dependency. AI companies promises incredible things but AI agents cannot produce it themselves, they need to eat you slowly first.
Maybe a good opportunity to reduce screensharing (unless pure video content). A lot of people are sharing webpages through video. That's subpar (except for the shared pointer)
I'm still somehow surprised at the implicit culture quality (concise, precise, extensive) of that wiki, because it seems there was no strictly enforced rules on how to create it. Similar-minded people recognized the quality and flocked to make it grow.
And it matches the mindset of some linux users quite strongly. We regularly see people relying on it even though there were other well documented distros, ubuntu for instance, but it's not the same (too newcomer focused, or too administrative in spirit..). the only wiki that felt close, was the sadly gone gentoo wiki, sharp and full of gems.
From the few ive read about previous decades, people joined adult life earlier, with easier and better integration around adults and cheaper housing or similar needs. This creates a different existential landscape imo
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