5 ms·

Yeah, when a program tries to be smart and repeatedly, helpfully "corrects" what you're doing, it often just gets in the way or corrupts your work. Word is the

Yeah, when a program tries to be smart and repeatedly, helpfully "corrects" what you're doing, it often just gets in the way or corrupts your work. Word is the first example that comes to mind (for myself, and many people). One such situation is they way that git just punts on hard merge decisions - coming up with accurate heuristics for complex merging is very difficult, but the programmer responsible for the merged content can usually make the decisions easily. This frees git up to focus instead on storing and propagating those decisions well.

encoderer 17y ago
Trouble is, you don't notice the thousand times when Word corrects a "teh", a caps "MIstake", or an apostrophe screw-up. But we do notice when it changes acronyms and other things in a way that makes us ctrl+z the auto-correct.
- stcredzero 17y ago
  A part of the problem is the top-down mandated idea of what is "correct." If these things can be adaptive in a non-intrusive way, then it can all be like "teh" and "MIstake." I would love to stop telling new word processors to stop correcting Smalltalk. I wonder if there's any way to keep information like that around with you? I can try to do 100% of my word processing on Google docs, but, am I ever going to get there? Preferences like this need to be tended by operating systems. If I tell one text editor widget about "Smalltalk," there's no reason why all of them across the system shouldn't know about it.
  - ptomato 17y ago
    "If I tell one text editor widget about "Smalltalk," there's no reason why all of them across the system shouldn't know about it." It is on OS X. (Leaving aside software that implements its own spellchecking, of course.)
omouse 17y ago
A program is created by a human being, a software developer, a programmer. So it is the programmer trying to be smart and clever.

encoderer 17y ago

Trouble is, you don't notice the thousand times when Word corrects a "teh", a caps "MIstake", or an apostrophe screw-up. But we do notice when it changes acronyms and other things in a way that makes us ctrl+z the auto-correct.

stcredzero 17y ago
A part of the problem is the top-down mandated idea of what is "correct." If these things can be adaptive in a non-intrusive way, then it can all be like "teh" and "MIstake." I would love to stop telling new word processors to stop correcting Smalltalk. I wonder if there's any way to keep information like that around with you? I can try to do 100% of my word processing on Google docs, but, am I ever going to get there? Preferences like this need to be tended by operating systems. If I tell one text editor widget about "Smalltalk," there's no reason why all of them across the system shouldn't know about it.
- ptomato 17y ago
  "If I tell one text editor widget about "Smalltalk," there's no reason why all of them across the system shouldn't know about it." It is on OS X. (Leaving aside software that implements its own spellchecking, of course.)

omouse 17y ago

A program is created by a human being, a software developer, a programmer. So it is the programmer trying to be smart and clever.