I’m glad it doesnt.

Git, probably

Please clarify, OP, did you mean

• hard to read semantically
• hard to read syntactically
• hard to relate how one could come with such a crappy idea, even considering all constraints of their time
• takes a lot brain real estate (justified or not)

?

Indeed. Makes it more work to filter the handful of good or even great articles from the 99.99% that use this platform for its apparent ease of money grubbing.

It’ll probably take Valhalla for me, personally.

I sure hope so, but I’m not overly optimistic tbh. The market is basically considered medical, therapeutic devices. It is as you imagine, probably worse. It isn’t easy to find prices directly, but the only way this range of vendors continues to exist in this niche market is to sell devices with the complexity of a keyboard for four to five digits. There is no competition worth talking about happening.

So unless very specific regulation takes place, I don’t see standardized access to braille displays happening.

Right, that is another item I wished more editors would have picked up. Besides - say - nested language modes.

Original poster is right by all accounts, of course. Now, let’s come up with exotic significant indentations.

function xyz(a, b):
|   var x = 2

|   if true:
|   |   do_something()
|   else:
|   |   do_something_else()

|   anyway()

Pro: Your editor no longer needs to implement indentation hints.

Con: Looks obstructive if not highlighted like an indentation hint.

Your turn.

That reminds me of those times when back on reddit some dev showed up to present their new GUI library. Bragging about how they were better than Qt devs etc. (even though they didn’t implement the hard parts, like working text fields or tables)

After some time a bunch of people had enough and started bullying those guys into submission about accessibility. After some time, every of those toolkits had support or at least plans for supporting screenreaders. Eventually, AccessKit became a thing.

Good times.

Of course, I might be overestimating how easy it is to get better braille oriented editors

A braille display traditionally is a personal, almost handfitted (estimated by price) device controlled by its screen reader software. Not the editor. This has some unfortunate implications:

• There is no (standardized) API to control your braille device directly. You could hand your screenreader filtered data, but that would be read as well. At best, you might be able to script your screen reader software to a varying degree of success. However:
  • Every aspect about this is extremely abysmal in every possible way, so it will likely require you to fork over some biiiiig amount of cash to one of the vendors to provide a brittle plugin. In particular if we are talking about JAWS. Think of extremely unstandardized COBOL dev with less stability and more price gauging involved.
  • As far as free readers are involved, only the proprietary and licensing aspect go away. Still, developing extensions is terrible in many ways. For example, for ORCA, I was able to find out that you can extend it somehow. Alledgedly. NVDA on the other hand has better documentation. That is to say, it has documentation. Now, you might recall that NVDA is written mostly in Python, and its devs rightly don’t even pretend that one could develop stable software in Python, so APIs might change. However, I wasn’t able to find a Filter function specific to braille output. That’s likely because
• From my superficial experience, developers of screen readers think of braille displays mostly as an alternative to speech. It even took them quite a while to be smart about not displaying redundant, long lines of text.

So yes, you might be overestimating how easy that is, compared to telling some diva asswipe chucklefuck to use that formatter or work at McDolans.

From what I can see it is a slightly more detailed take on dependencies, loose coupling etc. Seems like it is formal and a bit weird, though. And a few part seem… extrapolated. So, no wonder it never caught on.

It’s not exactly clear to me who is supposed to be more comfortable.

Anyhow:

• Avoid commands that require their own DSL. Most DSLs are ad hoc garbage, in particular when it comes to UX and UI design.

And the logical conclusion of this is there is a non-zero chance you get to enjoy the opportunity, no, the priviledge to maintain that 100k loc codebase written in someones personal PHP dialect. Lucky you.

Fortunately it’s been fixed since.

How long did that take, though?

Just wait until you learn that debuggers for XSLT exists. Wait, that’s no reason to smile.

That sentence seems correct. As for your question, you’d rather have to ask yourself: When would you pay for a programming language?

Back in the old days before internet and commodity hardware, before easy distribution, before non-trivial software, before basic compiler knowledge was common people were easily impressed, so naturally you could sell your compiler for primitive grug BASIC.

Today, that situation is different. A language by itself is meaningless, a risk, even, in some ways. A while back some developer of REM Objects was bitching about in the old aggregator on how nobody wanted to spend money on their special proprietary BASIC. Like it was just another product. They don’t know how to use a computer how programming languages work. This extends to even finding users willing to use your stuff for free. I don’t want to knock on REM Objects in particular, you know you could add way more examples like Seed7, every lisper ever etc., but let’s get into why people pay for programming languages.

• extreme vendor lock-in of platform, hardware, whatever (but you almost always have your language bundled with something else in the first place, because…)
• the point is a feature beyond the language (think matlab, labview, SAP, Excel or Coldfusion 8bitguy mentioned)
• dubious support contracts (think Oracle JDK)
• enthusiasts you can milk for life support and dumbfucks that fall for your next gen graph AI DSL whatever bla
• extremely great developer experience (but we live in an age where megacorps create languages and infrastructure for improved experience for free, so, good luck with that these days)

people don’t want to admin

Exactly right.

You can not perfect old languages, since there are a lot of features that you can not add on or change afterwards, OP. Not in a worthwile way. This is not a philosophical question, it wasn’t for a lack of trying. And since there aren’t enough skilled people in this niche, fashion driven field, expect history to repeat itself and some langs at best get 60 to 80% right.

Between the lack of null safety (which really shouldn’t have been a thing since the 90s), the incapacity in community management and lack of focus of the core devs mentioned by Gnome Kat and glad_cat, I tried Dlang in roughly 2015. It was an OKish experience for trivial tasks, but I noticed the amount of churn in dub packages.

TL;DR: I would not. And for the same reasons, I wouldn’t recommend Scala either.

Nice choice of logo colors, btw.