25 Matching Annotations
  1. Apr 2025
    1. A lot of it feels like someone who doesn’t like the old code and wants to do it “right.” I can agree that the old code is ugly. But it will take an awful lot of effort to make a new implementation. It’s a lot like what happened to Elvis: A rewrite was going to make it much better, but it took so long, during which Vim added more features, that eventually there are not so many Elvis users. And the rewritten Elvis may have nice code, but users don’t notice that.
  2. Dec 2022
    1. YAML parsing is normally considered hard (complicated as the syntax is complex). With all due respect, personally I can adhere to that in part, the YAML specification appears to be at (isolated) places hard to read despite me self-imagined being trained over decades into reading publicly available specifications (in not my first language). To be fair, it is one of the very few specs that has graphics and by the nature of its formulation, compilers are hard to read as well.
  3. Nov 2021
  4. Jun 2021
    1. Today, Sass uses complex heuristics to figure out whether a / should be treated as division or a separator. Even then, as a separator it just produces an unquoted string that’s difficult to inspect from within Sass.
  5. May 2021
  6. Mar 2021
    1. For the $$$ question, nothing comes to mind. These problems i'm hitting up against are larger than a contractor could solve in a few hours of work (which would be hundreds/thousands of dollars).
    2. Progress is slow though. I want to change how assets are loaded, the current implementation of "pipelines" is challenging to work with.
    1. Validating forms has notoriously been a painful development experience. Implementing client side validation in a user friendly, developer friendly, and accessible way is hard. Before HTML5 there was no means of implementing validation natively; therefore, developers have resorted to a variety of JavaScript based solutions.
    1. Redesigning the pieces was very difficult work, because traditional pieces have 4 specialties below.
  7. Feb 2021
    1. It turns out that, given a set of constraints defining a particular problem, deriving an efficient algorithm to solve it is a very difficult problem in itself. This crucial step cannot yet be automated and still requires the insight of a human programmer.
    1. It is difficult to come up with content that is not extracted from a real application. Manufacturing scenarios to see if ideas have practical application turned out to be an exhasting and time consuming process.
  8. Jan 2021
    1. They say that there are only two hard problems in computer science: cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-one errors. Caching is what Service Workers do. It’s literally the #1 hard thing! … or maybe the #0 thing? Whatever. It’s hard.
  9. Oct 2020