4 ms·

Text layout is just hard. There’s a lot of history you need to encode as rules, and you end up with a very complicated system that is hard to abstract because t

by hinoki 4y ago

Text layout is just hard. There’s a lot of history you need to encode as rules, and you end up with a very complicated system that is hard to abstract because there are circular dependencies all over the place. This bug was because the size of the container depends on the text, whose layout depends on the container. Text just wouldn’t look “right” if we skipped it. It’s as “human” a problem as dates and time, probably worse! Your best bet is to use libraries to avoid the whole problem, but that means delegating all layout which might not be possible.

ynniv 4y ago
"Just use Unix time!" Some problems have a surprising amount of inherent complexity. Java has tried a few times to solve date values, and the results are sometimes unusably complicated. I don't know what the answer is... an even more sophisticated type system? A linting step in the tool chain? An academic paper? An industry publication? Hardware improves every month, but some parts of software worked better thirty years ago.