Mathematica is the earliest thing I am aware of with this feature where it was Alt+. to expand selection in their notebook interface starting in the early 90s. But the thing I miss most that I still can't shake the muscle memory of after almost a decade of not using much Mathematica, is that single/double/triple/n-click scaled this way as well. So double-click selected a whole word (as in all editors), triple-click selected all the comma-separated multiple args of a function, 4-click for f(a,r,g,s), and so on.
Agreed with others it's just what you're used to. I was inverted-y for most of my gaming life because I started with flight sims where it was mandatory, reflecting the real life hardware. So I used the same in FPS games when they came around. Decades later I had kids and had to spend some time sharing a mouse with them, and didn't want to condemn them to a life of having to look for "inverted Y axis" in the settings of every game (+1 to the post above who requested an OS-level setting for this!), so I left it on the default in Minecraft and learned the other way. Now I'm actually bilingual and can swap from one to the other with about 2 minutes warm up time. This is the same as what happens with driving on the left/right side of the road if you spend a lot of time in different countries driving.
With my kids I drew the grumpy line at Minecraft's new Autojump setting tho ... They had to learn with that disabled.
One idea for what happens next, that rhymes with pop-up blocker revolution, is Gates' "disintermediation of everything" via AI, where agents on our behalf will be able to "find me a video I like and don't show me the ads", "renew my electricity contract and don't let them soft-scam me with their tricky pricing structure", "buy groceries online and don't get tricked into buying candy from a promo", etc. Agents make become like popup blockers in that way. Subsequent to that, I reckon we may see some sites adopting TOS forbidding people to have AI agents visit on their behalf.
(Maybe skip the mini-insults & make the site nicer for all?)
Anyway I think GP has a point worth considering. I have had a related hope in the context of journalism / chain of trust that was mentioned above: if anyone can produce a Faux News Channel tailored to their own quirks on demand, and can see everyone else doing the same, will it become common knowledge that Stuff Can Be Fake, and motivate people to explicitly decide about trust beyond "Trust Screens"?
This is how Eiffel works. Instead of private, protected, public, you specify the set of classes a method can be seen by: `feature {ANY}` for `public:`, feature {NONE} for private, feature {Self} (IIRC) for protected, feature {Foo, Bar} for descendants of Foo and those of Bar, etc.
It seems a standard childhood memory! I had a chicken and salad sandwich downgraded to a salad sandwich while I held it my hands as a child. Couple of decades later, almost identical thing happened to my own kid.
In 2004 I owned only my laptop, with no full size keyboard -- but the sword fighting minigame really benefits from a numeric keypad. And so I bought a USB numeric keypad, which is an odd little accessory which, every 5 years or so, proves handy for some reason or other.
+1 this breadth vs depth framing. I notice this in aider itself: What right does that project have to support all those command line options, covering every little detail, and all optionally via Env variables too, and/or yaml file, and .MD docs of them all up to date? Answer: aider itself was clearly used to write all that breadth of features.
I get so much value out of this site in all sorts of important fields (to my career, or to my interest) where I am playing catch-up.
But every couple of months a thread pop up in a field I am closer to state of the art, giving me a helpful reminder about the Gell Mann Amnesia Effect. I am sure others with variety of "Before Hacker" backgrounds experience the same in their own fields.
With this I can pinpoint the exact first bug I created, and debugged. The year was 1991 +/- 1, the place was Canberra Australia. For unknown reasons that changed my life forever, my Dad got on board with this "computer" thing and bought an "Osborne" 486 PC. That year I went to the school fete and, for AUD 0.20, picked up a used copy of this book, leafed through the pages, settled on Hammurabi, and after some struggle and discussions with friends, managed to run Q-Basic and typed this program into it. And it sort of worked, but something was wrong, and after much experimentation I found that on line 11 (only today, with this post can, I finally state the true line number) I had written "LET P=P+1" instead of the correct "LET P=P+I". After a fair bit (days) of trial and error and 10-year-old reasoning, I figured that out, and so it began.
> In fact, it can be nice to do one's explorations in the REPL and then reify one's discoveries as tests.
This is how I wrote unit tests when I worked on Mathematica: try out every edge cases of the function in a notebook, and then use a tool to extract all the input/output cells and convert them to tests. I didn't know the term reify for this practice, I like it!
Previously there was a tension between easy-to-write (helper functions to group together oft-repeated lines of code, etc) vs easy to read (where often modest repetition is fine and is clearer). I felt this tension a lot in tests where the future reader is very happy with explicit lines of code setting things up, whereas the test author is bored and writes layers of helper functions to speed their work up.
But for LLMs, it seems readability of code pretty much equals its writability?
To make code more authorable by LLM, we approximately just need to make it more readable in the traditional sense (code comments, actual abstractions not just code-saving helper functions, etc).
> Mathematica notebooks aren't related to juypter.
I don't think that's fair. Rather, IPython, and later Jupyter, explicitly (successfully) sought to create a Mathematica-like notebook experience for Python.