They are just the biggest asshole in the room.

So one day the different body parts were arguing over who should be in charge.

The eyes said they should be in charge, because they were the primary source of information about the world.

The stomach said it should be in charge because digestion was the source of energy.

The brain said it should be in charge because it was in charge of information processing and decision-making.

The rectum said nothing, just closed up shop.

Before long, the vision was blurry, the stomach was queasy, and the brain was foggy.

Assholes have been in charge ever since.

And yet more sites do it, even on desktop. As far as I can tell, most of them are also doing it in a way that breaks security by validating the username before asking for the password.

1. I'm a programmer, so I must know how to get X done in Y software.

2. I don't use or so I'm some kind of Luddite and can't possibly know anything useful about computers.

One thing that fascinates me about #1 is that the absolute raw dependency people have on Google doesn't seem to ever lead to searching for a tutorial.

There was a thread elsewhere asking whether a toggle should show current state or the state desired. There was enough disagreement that it quickly became apparent that, whatever else the toggle does, there should be something external to the toggle showing the possible states, indicating which way to move the toggle regardless of toggle appearance.

In that spirit, I will call attention to your first sentence, specifically the comma. In my opinion, that can be improved. One of three other constructions would be more appropriate:

• I am really happy when people are quite strict in code reviews. It makes me feel safer and I get to learn more.
• I am really happy when people are quite strict in code reviews, because it makes me feel safer and I get to learn more.
• I am really happy when people are quite strict in code reviews; it makes me feel safer and I get to learn more.

The first of my suggested changes is favoured by those who follow the school of thought that argues that written sentences should be kept short and uncomplicated to make processing easier for those less fluent. To me, it sounds choppy or that you've omitted someone asking "Why?" after the first sentence.

Personally, I prefer the middle one, because it is the full expression of a complete state of mind. You have a feeling and a reason for that feeling. There is a sense in which they are inseparable, so not splitting them up seems like a good idea. The "because" explicitly links the feeling and reason.

The semicolon construction was favoured by my grade school teachers in the 1960s, but, as with the first suggestion, it just feels choppy. I tend to overuse semicolons, so I try to go back and either replace them with periods or restructure the sentences to eliminate them. In this particular case, I think the semicolon is preferable to both comma and period, but still inferior to the "because" construction.

I've clearly spent too much time hashing stuff out in writers' groups. :)

Good article that I think does a pretty good job of outlining the problems of "Computer time is less expensive than programmer time."

I was "raised" on the idea that end-user time is more valuable than programmer time and nobody really talked about computer time except in the case of unattended-by-design systems like batch processing. Even those were developed to save end-user time by, for example, preparing standard reports overnight so that they would be ready for use in the morning.

I think that one place we went off the rails was the discovery that one way to manage efficiency was by creating different classes of end-user: internal and external. Why would management care about efficiency when the cost of inefficiency is paid by someone else?

So much software is created explicitly for the purpose of getting someone else to do the work. That means the quicker you get something out there, the quicker you start benefiting, almost without regard to how bad the system is. And why bother improving it if it's not chasing customers away?

The left side (linear) looks like the code I write while I'm trying to figure out whether I understand the problem or I'm not quite sure what all I need to do prove that I can (or cannot!) solve the problem.

The code on the right, with all the "abstractions" looks like the code I end up with after I've got everything sorted out and want to make things easier to read, find, and maintain.

I actually find the code on the right easier to read. I treat it like a well written technical manual. For me, understanding starts with time spent on the table of contents just to get a sense of the domain. That is followed by reading the opening and closing sections of each chapter, and finally digging into the details. I stop at any level that meets my needs, including just picking and choosing based on the table of contents if there is no clear need to understand the entire domain in order to accomplish my goal.

I've preferred code written in that "abstracted" style since discovering the joy of GOSUB and JSR on my VIC-20.

Old fart warning!

Presentation is left to the reader's client. Do you want dark mode? Get a markdown editor/reader that supports it. Do you want serif font? Again, that's client's choice and not part of the document.

I remember when that is how the web worked. All that markup was to define the structure of the document and the client rendered it as set by the user.

Some clients were better than others. My favourite was the default browser in OS/2 Warp, which allowed me to easily set the display characteristics of every tag. The end result was that every site looked (approximately) the same, which made browsing so much nicer, in my opinion.

Then someone decided that website creation should be part of the desktop publishing class (at least at the school I taught at). The world (wide web) has never recovered.

I learned that Android was not open under my personal definition of "open" right from the outset, because there was no programmatic access to telephony. My first project was to build an on-board answering machine with call screening capabilities.

I used an answering machine on my landline to avoid paying for caller id and voicemail and wanted to do the same with my cellphone. I was very disappointed to learn that this was not possible, at least with my skillset.

I knew that things were going the wrong way when my Tasker script to manage airplane mode stopped working when Android required locked it away. My use case there was that lack of connectivity at the gym and at home meant that connection attempts were draining my battery and heating up the phone. Now, of course, Android does a much better job of that particular task on its own, but it still makes me cranky. :)

Everything that has happened since has only cemented my opinion that Android is not actually an open platform. I do see many of the changes as potentially valuable security measures for the masses, but I wish that it wasn't quite so difficult for a power user to use the power of the little computer we carry in our pockets.

I eventually learned to never trust any restrictions on the user.

I quickly learned to make sure everyone had a copy of decisions made, so that I could charge by the hour for changes. I eventually learned to include examples of what would and would not be possible in any specification or change order.

Maybe I read things too literally, but I thought "Fahrenheit 451" was about a governing class controlling the masses by limiting which ideas, emotions, and information were available.

"Brave New World" struck me as also about controlling the masses through control of emotions, ideas, and information (and strict limits on social mobility).

It's been too long since I read "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea", but I thought of it as a celebration of human ingenuity, with maybe a tinge of warning about powerful tools and the responsibility to use them wisely.

I don't see a lot of altruistic behaviour from those introducing new technologies. Yes, there is definitely some, but most of it strikes me as "neutral" demand creation for profit or extractive and exploitive in nature.

I have two hypotheses for why some kinds of software grow worse over time. They are not mutually exclusive and, in fact, may both be at work in some cases.

Software has transitioned from merely complex to chaotic. That is, there is so much going on within a piece of software and its interactions with other pieces of software, including the operating system itself, that the mathematics of chaos are often more applicable than logic. In a chaotic system, everything from seemingly trivial differences between two ostensibly identical chips to the order in which software is installed, updated, and executed has an effect on the operating environment, producing unpredictable outcomes. I started thinking about the systems I was using with this in mind sometime in the early 2000s.

The "masters" in the field are not paying enough attention to the "apprentices" and "journeymen. Put another way, there are too many programmers like me left unsupervised. I couldn't have had a successful career without tools like Visual Basic and Access, the masterful documentation and tutorials they came with, and the wisdom to make sure I was never in a position where my software might have more than a dozen users at a time at any one site. Now we have people who don't know enough to use one selection to limit the options for the next selection juggling different software and frameworks trying to work in teams to do the bidding of someone who can barely type. And the end result is supposed to be used by thousands of people on all manner of equipment and network connections.

One reason that open source software seems more reliable is that people like me, even if we think we can contribute, are mostly dissuaded by the very complexity of the process. The few of us who do navigate the system to make a contribution have our offerings carefully scrutinized before acceptance.

Another reason that open source software seems more reliable is that most of it is aimed at those with expertise or desiring expertise. At least in my experience, that cohort is much more tolerant of those things that more casual users find frustrating.