Where has the practice of sending screen shots as source code come from?

[Gene Heskett]

On Sunday 28 January 2018 10:55:30 Peter J. Holzer wrote:

> On 2018-01-28 15:04:26 +0000, Steven D'Aprano wrote:
> > I'm seeing this annoying practice more and more often. Even for
> > trivial pieces of text, a few lines, people post screenshots instead
> > of copying the code.
> >
> > Where has this meme come from?
>
> Twitter? You can't send more than 140 characters[1], but you can send
> an image, so just put your text in an image to get around pesky size
> restrictions.
>
> But no, our users have done that for much longer than twitter exists.
> The typical mail to support doesn't contain an error message in plain
> text, not even a screenshot, it contains a word (or excel) file with a
> screenshot of the error message (typically scaled down so that the
> error message isn't readable any more).
>
> It reminds me about the old joke about the mathematician making
> coffee: He finds an empty cup in the sink, rinses it, puts some ground
> coffee and water into the coffee maker, waits for the water to run
> through and pours the coffee into the cup.
> The next day he wants some coffee again. But there is no cup in the
> sink. Instead there is a cup in the cupboard. So he takes the cup from
> the cupboard and puts it into the sink. Now he has reduced the problem
> to a previously solved problem and proceeds as before.
>
> Similarly the user sending a wort attachment instead of a plain text
> message knows how to take a screenshot, knows how to paste that into
> word and knows how to attach a word file to an email. So they combine
> those steps. They may or may not know how to copy some text into the
> email (to be fair, Windows error messages often cannot be copied), but
> it simply doesn't occur to them.
>
> I used to think that programmers (or techies in general) ought to be
> able to write emails in a fashion that makes it easy to extract the
> necessary information. I have since been disabused of the notion.
> Programmers are just as thoughtless and unable to put themselves into
> the recipient's shoes as the general population.
>
> Oh, and finally there is tools: I switched to Outlook for in-company
> mails a year ago (because my boss wants me to top-post and I simply
> can't do that if I have a decent editor, but with a crappy program
> like Outlook I can) and it is just amazing how time consuming it is to
> format a mail containing code examples to be readable. Taking a
> screenshot and pasting it into the mail is faster (even though
> Outlooks inline image handling is also atrocious).
>
> > (The day a programmer posts a WAV file of themselves reading their
> > code out aloud, is the day I turn my modem off and leave the
> > internet forever.)
>
> When the first MIME RFCs came out, a co-worker predicted that we would
> soon get audio-clips as signatures. Thank god he was wrong about that.
>
>         hp
>
> [1] 280 now.

But by mentioning it, somebody will now do it. The problem will be what 
the hell do you play it with...

-- 
Cheers, Gene Heskett
--
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
 soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
Genes Web page <http://geneslinuxbox.net:6309/gene>