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by wizerdrobe 924 days ago
I’m always amazed at coworkers with a 100 WPM typing speed and IntelliSense griping about how hard it is to type.
1 comments

Inbound links from HN blocked I think, but Tom Macwright's proclamation that typing is not the problem has long stuck with me. https://macwright.com/2015/01/19/typing-is-not-the-problem

These optimizations for some perceived ergonomic win almost always make terrible tradeoffs versus using a good well established data format. And especially systems which favor human consumption but create extreme difficulties for machine handling, those are the worst!

Yaml being such a non-Context Free Grammar is a huge pain. There's so much state in the parser. It only gets worse from there. Yaml has all kinds of wild crazy capabilities. References, a variety of inline content blocks, and weird ways to invoke stuff?? GitHub yesterday did a code review of Frigate, an enormously popular surveillance video analysis tool that's heavily downloaded, and found, oh yes, a huge glaring yaml bug allowing remote execution, because executing arbitrary code is just built right in to yaml amid 3000 other crazy hacks & who would have known to go look for & disable that capability?! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38630295 https://github.blog/2023-12-13-securing-our-home-labs-frigat...

Typing is not the problem (even though I see so many people just terrible beyond words at navigating project structures or the command line... Improve! Some day!).