[II2II]

Is it really telling? A couple of things to consider:

- The original Macintosh did not use icons as heavily as software in 1995. From my vague recollections of 1995, the computers of today may even use fewer icons. (It was a time when there were icons on buttons, like a check-mark on an Okay button, and icons on individual menu items.)

- Even arbitrarily overlapping Windows seem less common these days. People have been maximizing applications for ages. These days, tiling is increasingly popular on desktops (e.g. Windows Snap) and people typically run apps full screen on mobile devices (with split screen, rather than floating window managers, being the only alternative). It's also worth noting that 1995 was part of the era of multiple document interfaces, which were arbitrarily overlapping windows inside of arbitrarily overlapping windows.

Wirth seems to be taking a far more extreme stance than the examples I have provided, yet the early years of the 1990's were also an era of excess. While 1995 Wirth would probably strongly disagree with the software of today, modern software looks austere compared to some of the software of the 1990's while the performance of modern hardware means the user is going to feel less of an impact due to the user interface.

[Groxx]

>It was a time when there were icons on buttons, like a check-mark on an Okay button, and icons on individual menu items.

tbh I wish we would go back to this. Even with the variation in styles, those icons provided language-agnostic "names" for things. If you're using a computer stuck in a different language / with different layout patterns, a checkmark in a primary position is much less ambiguous than having to guess if this is a yes/no/ok/cancel/abort/retry/fail/ignore of some kind.

[megameter]

Unfortunately, checkmarks aren't language agnostic - abstract iconography as a whole is a linguistic phenomenon. I'll just copy paste Wikipedia's notes(edit: HN breaks on the actual symbols so I'll link too):

It is common in Swedish schools for a to indicate that an answer is incorrect,[2][3][4] while "R", from the Swedish rätt, i.e., "correct", is used to indicate that an answer is correct.

In Finnish, stands for väärin, i.e., "wrong", due to its similarity to a slanted v. The opposite, "correct", is marked with {\displaystyle \cdot \!/\!\cdot }\cdot \!/\!\cdot , a slanted vertical line emphasized with two dots.[5]

In Japan[6] and Korea, the O mark is used instead of the check mark, and the X or mark are commonly used for wrong (alongside a triangle △ for entries that are problematic but not wholly incorrect).[citation needed]

In the Netherlands a 'V' is used to show that things are missing while the flourish of approval (or krul) is used for approving a section or sum.

In Brazil, the check character is used to indicate the "yes" concept. For example "yes, it was checked" or "yes, this is the right answer".

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Check_mark

[Groxx]

Fair, there's next to nothing that's actually universal across all languages / cultures. I do always find the variations interesting though, thanks for the link!