Zig couldn't be further away from Haskell in features and community culture.

The problem is that while it has warts still, in reality it isn't much different than the human slop from offshoring projects.

Thus it is already good enough for many companies.

Because many of them also profited from the colonial powers instead of standing by their own, as means to grow their own influences and wealth.

True in theory, except in many places that Web app comes packaged inside a Web view.

Same is happening in Germany as well, including the supermarket apps mentioned at the end of the article.

Even better, in NRW region some ticket models are only available on the app, nowhere to be found on the ticket machines or at the counter on the stations.

These store discount coupon apps are a plague, and then often things don't even work (like login etc). The other day the radio aired an Aldi ad advertising some on sale items "cheap without an app". That's the way to go.

Yeah, know that one, obviously trolling Lidl,given how much they push their app versus others.

We have a Penny store around the corner, and that's the one that often logged me out and made problems, so I just stopped using it.

There are those of us that also remember when they were at the verge of being nothing, and even turned to Linux as possible rescue alternative (mkLinux).

That NeXT acquisition turned out great.

Is that the case today, or are things different today?

I am quite sure they still use optical on the German shops.

Nope, at least the Berlin shop is on RFID on all products.

Yeah, unless they changed on NRW shop on my area since August.

My diving mask and backpack certainly went through optical.

Not in Berlin, not in Hamburg

I guess NRW is exceptional, or had broken devices in August.

Yeah, I was expecting yet another post about going back to 1980's UNIX, CP/M, MS-DOS/Novell, MVS, VMS,... experience from people that didn't had to put up with the experience in first place.

I advise to check Emacs history before its widespread adoption on UNIX.

Especially Zmacs and XEmacs, and how their features eventually found a way back into Emacs proper.

You want a butterfly keyboard?

Show me the butterfly keyboard on MacBook less than 6 years old?

The point is about how it was produced in first place, having taken six years to get a proper replacement, despite the supposed quality of premium Apple products.

Then there is the Antennagate on iPhone, the buggy OS releases, and plenty other examples that I can refer from what is totally unacceptable given the price point of their products.

Others aren't better, but at least they don't pretend otherwise.

Apple is held to a higher standard because they have historically reached it on a semi-regular basis. Enough that people expect it. Enough that people get personally offended whenever they fall short.

There are enough examples since Apple I, where they historical failed to do so, so much of them, that they are only around because NeXT "acquired" them, and the old founder came back into the bridge with enough time to steer the ship away from the iceberg.

The quality cult is even worse among those that never experienced old Apple.

They get so personally offended that they renew hardware almost yearly, regardless of the bugs and software issues.

For what it's worth, my first Apple was a IIe, followed by a 512K Macintosh, and I still have a first-edition NeXTWorld magazine I bought at the time.

The definition of quality in the Apple world isn't quite the same as in the nerd world, much as an Alfa Romeo fan and a Toyota fan may mean different things by quality. Joy and reliability both matter, and it's very easy for people who value them differently to end up talking past each other.

Yeah, the distortion field exists for a reason, given Liquid Glass, Swift UI issues, Tahoe and Golden Gate bugs, it is hard to have joy when they prevent work on premium hardware.

The Mac went through an OS dark ages in the 1990s.

It went through a silicon dark ages in the 2000s.

It went through a hardware dark ages in the 2010s.

It seems to be going through a user layer software dark ages in the 2020s. And it's especially frustrating because Apple is on an absolute tear with their OS, silicon and hardware right now. They've never made a better hardware product and, love it or hate it, the core OS is pretty damn solid. It's the shit they're piling into the distro—and the shit they're forcing developers to deal with—which sucks balls.

As for joy: It's hard to have joy in an Alfa Romeo that has unsolvable electrical gremlins and the engine mounts are rusted away. Except people do. It's hard to have joy in a Toyota when all driving feel is engineered out of it. Except people do.