> I'm only a hobby programmer and the experience wasn't encouraging.
I have come across elitist communities like on SO, also regarding C++. I was downvoted and told to intentionally be spreading misinformation by using the word 'struct', because as you should know, in C++ there are only classes...
I haven't encountered that kind of vitriol when I asked beginner questions about how loops work, on 4chan out of all places.
But there were also times where I spent hours with people chatting on IRC while learning, where people were forgiving and encouraging.
In both places however, it seemed to be unfathomable for people that someone was trying to learn to program, not because they had to because of school or uni.
You are absolutely correct and I was an idiot without a proper understanding of premature abstraction or unnecessary complexity.
If I were to start a new side-project using Haskell today (I probably won't), I would just stick to do-notation and even concrete types (instead of mtl-style or what have you) where possible.
I once had a hard to track down bug in some code making use of conduit[0], which is introduced using examples like `main = runConduit $ (yield 1 >> yield 2) .| mapM_C print`.
Dutifully replacing every occurrence of (>>) with (>), because it was more modern, suddenly changed the semantics somewhere, due to the fact that (>>) is defined with fixity `infixl 1 >>` and (>) as `infixl 4 >` - i.e. both are left-associated operators, but (*>) binds tighter than (>>) and some of the myriad of other operators you may encounter.
I am simplifying in saying that they outright block FF, but the site is broken with Enhanced Tracking Protection enabled [0], and has been for a while. They even mention FF in a dedicated error message, which I have to admit just grinds my gears :)
I like the sentiment, but the article ignores that this approach may incur the price of adding complexity to the implementation.
Depending on your architectural constraints, adding an undo operation may not only be hard, it may necessitate changes which in turn make future changes harder as well.
Or it may not, of course - as usual it depends.
But even assuming that you are able to follow this advice, I assume (and have personally witnessed) another side-effect.
Just as people get accustomed to, and ignore, warnings, they will just as well become accustomed to being able to undo mistakes, and as a consequence become less careful about what they're doing.
One may argue that reserving warnings for only the non-undoable operations will improve their signal-to-noise-ratio and compensate for an overall gain, but whether that is true and worth the additional complexity is not black-and-white.
It's likely dependent on the 'user archetype'. If you need to e.g. lookup things related to beginner-friendly programming languages, the search results for Google are strongly tainted with SEO crap.
Being able to either outright block/pin sites, or only lower/raise them in your search results, made a difference for me after a few days of searching.
I do hope the future of search will include being able to use natural language, but also still the more precise '"This" +"That"'.
In any case, more competition is a good thing, the lack of it is what got us into this mess in the first place.
My (uninformed and probably misguided) idea was that there was a host DNS service (responsible e.g. for resolving local domain names) which would cause Windows itself to trigger some rule when 'web.whatsapp.com' is encountered.
But yeah, the PWA thing seems more plausible, even though I was not aware of any install prompt or similar.
I would need to read up on PWA, and there seems to be a LOT unfortunately.
Even Firefox will in general not protect you I believe.
I showed my mom how she can use 'web.whatsapp.com' to use Whatsapp more easily (in order to share screenshots or links with others).
After logging in, a notification about Whatsapp having been installed from the app store popped up after a few seconds. And indeed, the Desktop app had been installed, without any user interaction whatsoever.
I am not even sure how this was initiated, but I believe DoH being disabled by default probably has to do with it.
Edit: Like a lot of comments have suggested, I most likely remember this wrong. I tried to reproduce this (after "forgetting about" whatsapp.com in Firefox and uninstalling the app) and was unable to. I did encounter three separate "install the app" buttons, all of which however yielded an additional installation prompt from the app store.
While that is generally true, as others have already reported there is progress being made.
Since a few days ago, I tried installing/running Elden Ring again, which did not work when it came out due to EAC. Works flawlessly out of the box now.
I have come across elitist communities like on SO, also regarding C++. I was downvoted and told to intentionally be spreading misinformation by using the word 'struct', because as you should know, in C++ there are only classes... I haven't encountered that kind of vitriol when I asked beginner questions about how loops work, on 4chan out of all places.
But there were also times where I spent hours with people chatting on IRC while learning, where people were forgiving and encouraging.
In both places however, it seemed to be unfathomable for people that someone was trying to learn to program, not because they had to because of school or uni.