The "loop and a half"

[Chris Angelico]

On Mon, Oct 9, 2017 at 3:50 AM, bartc <bc at freeuk.com> wrote:
> Yeah, well, some people like to be sheep, others like to be individuals**.

Yeah, well, some people like to be standards-compliant, others like to
be irrelevant morons.

> I start in computing at a time when an application was the only thing
> running on a computer, at least, when people had personal computers of their
> own. Then it really didn't matter what went on outside, as nothing did.
>
> (That approach seems to have become popular again with tablets and things
> usually having one application occupying the screen at a time.)
>
> And within an application, it can do what it likes.

It's 2017. Even on a phone/tablet, where there isn't enough room to
usefully display more than one app *at a time*, you still have
multiple apps.

> With regards to editing,
> there are some common conventions that I absolutely hate:
>
> * Under Windows, if you press Shift while Caps Lock is on, you get lower
> case letters. I've never, ever wanted to do this (probably no one else has).
> My own editor doesn't obey that convention: shift-A will always come out as
> 'A' whatever the caps lock setting.
>
> There are dozens more, yet you are surprised why sometimes I prefer doing
> things my own way? There are good reasons!

Yep. Good reasons like that you're a moron. You assume that since
*you* have never needed to produce one lower-case letter in a block of
upper-case, that "probably no one else has", and then you make it
impossible to do that in your editor. I have wanted to produce a
lower-case letter by holding Shift. I have also used this behaviour to
detect and recognize faults of various sorts. Do you understand the
concept of debugging a system by getting more information, not less?

> (**I was in the audience of a Michael Palin interview a couple of weeks
> back. (You know, an actual Python!) Before he came on the audience was
> programmed to respond to the word 'individuals' by all saying 'Yes, we are
> all individuals!'. Apart from me, obviously.)

Obviously. Which meant that the crowd created a joke, and you simply
didn't take part in it. You became irrelevant.

ChrisA