I didn't see an opening bracket for sarcasm so I assume it's before 'Great win'. Were they really surprised by this? Also are they same people that didn't know putting hard drives in space would fail because of the lack of air and had to replace them with SSDs?
I once tried reddit's default look, its old mobile look and its new beta mobile look on my psp. All 3 looked terrible so I was very surprised that HN looked perfect on both. It doesn't need any fixing.
Indeed it is not perfect use of the English language but why complain about it or brag that you noticed the mistake? Most people who understand English can read 'txt' as 'text' and 'wrk' as 'work' and if the theory that intelligence is defined by how well you can predict, then you are only bragging the way about the ways you lack intelligence. I have never considered myself as smarter than average but my brain parsed that whole text without error.
Some people can't read through a spelling or grammar mistake without cringing. I am one of them. I don't know why -- maybe the brain's error-detection techniques work by making me really uncomfortable every time I see one.
Anyway, it has nothing to do with "bragging" when you complain about errors.
In the early days D seemed like a real good idea as a cleanup replacement for C++ with potential to innovate in some areas such as the multi core revolution.
The developers started off with something that was compatible with C in the same way C++ was but couldn't make up there mind whether they would like to depart or maintain that relationship. Then they kept adding increasingly more features/complexity and a lot of the decisions were pressured and rushed out the door by Andrei Alexandrescu so he could meet the deadlines for the book everyone had preordered. Eventually D was left as a language that had no idea what it was trying to be.
Haskell is such a great language and it's a real shame that not many companies see it's advantages. There was recently a discussion on haskell-cafe[1] about it's lack of adoption in industries other than finance.
Haskell is perfectly suited for critical systems: I've seen job postings for C++ programmers for air traffic control systems which I think could really do with haskell's type safety.
In recent years however haskell performance and library availability has made it suitable for general high level programming like web development for example[2][3].
The author suggests a design app based on web kit and then clarigies in the comments that he meant any layout engine:
"Why Webkit? Do we really want a design application that is specific to a single rendering engine?
WebKit is just one option. Gecko could work too. I guess with the advent of Safari for Windows and Chrome, WebKit just seemed like the go-to. I don’t actually know that it’s important which browser gets used, just so long as it’s on a healthy development track and is consistent enough to be predictable. Whatever the option, it wouldn’t replace testing in the browser, just merely provide a consistent window to it."
Despite the coincidental naming, no. That's "just another formal modeling tool" and isn't particularly likely to lead to a revolution in programming of any sort anymore than any other formal modeling tool that formally models the "same old" programming techniques the author decries.
I was tempted to link http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Haskell/Zippers , and now I guess I have, as another sort of "thing that happens to share terminology with calculus", but it is equally offtopic. Calculus here is metaphorically the same calculus that you looked ahead to when you were in middle school; a mysterious land where the impossible is trivial and full of strange concepts and funny squiggles. We are that middle schooler.
Really, though, it's fair to read this essay as "Gosh, I sure wish a silver bullet existed" and stretching only a bit further "If only there were some way to get around the fact it takes great programmers to make great programs". The silver bullet is that metaphorical calculus here, but it's a call for a silver bullet all the same. We can all nod in recognition of the desire, even as we are fairly sure nothing more will come of this than any other desire for the silver bullet.
