korrents

korrents · piece

in which the word column has several meanings, none of them architectural

Phil Hagelberg · 25 Jul 2022 · technomancy.us ↗

2 korrents from this piece

Phil Hagelberg did not write this page.

Every claim below was made in this piece, quoted word for word and numbered in the order the piece makes them, so you can read it there rather than take our word for it. The sentence above each quote is our reading of the claim, not their wording. Each quote was checked against a stored copy of the page at build time; where the two differ, the quote is the fact.

  1. Our reading

    Software design that assumes text behaves predictably like English reflects the cultural bias of its typically white American developers.

    Their wordsIn my opinion the root cause of this bug is that when a white american developer sees a terminal they immediately interpret it as this idealized cartesian plane where they can lay out any writing they want in neatly-spaced characters that behave in "predictable" ways (in other words, behave exactly like English).

  2. Our reading

    Because programming requires forgetting, developers should weigh the costs of their abstractions and who those abstractions leave out.

    Their wordsProgramming, of course, is forgetting, but we need to at least try to be aware of the costs of the abstractions we choose and consider who it is that ends up being forgotten.