It's common enough that it's training me to recognize and recoil from AI tics through sheer classical conditioning.

I remember when Windows gained experimental support for a UTF-8 locale usable with its 8-bit APIs. I used to run it at work; it had some issues at first, but most got shaken out pretty quickly. I don't know its current state, but that's probably the best route to UTF-8 on Windows if MS would lean into it.

Personally I'd like a world where Unicode gave up all the compromises that come with supporting UTF-16. But presumably burning all your early adopters is not a winning strategy.

(To be fair, this one says so up top. Even so my eyes skipped over it.)

So I find the reaction helpful. I want to read posts in the best human style, but if the angry mob can’t motivate those, at least I can notice the pitchforks and torches, slap my forehead, and say, “Oh, that explains it.”

As for me personally, I consider refcounting and GC overlapping categories. I am perfectly willing to call CPython’s reference counting plus cycle collector a form of garbage collection, because it is transparent to the programmer. Every memory management technique has tradeoffs and pathological edge cases, but since you don’t have to consider them in the ordinary course of programming I’d say it counts. If you had to break cycles manually, or to annotate which references should be counted, I’d call that refcounting but not GC – as in the C++ stdlib.

The colloquial term is clear in context, and it draws its boundaries in useful places. If academia prefers other boundaries to simplify its formal definitions, that’s understandable. But the rest of us shouldn’t restrict our language in that way.

At this point I think it's clear his resignation was not voluntary. Maybe the other offer was sincere, or maybe it wasn't; I'm not sure how we could tell.

You need to get into either fishing (chartreuse lures are common) or cocktails: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chartreuse_(liqueur) .

This feels more like a party trick than anything. But it does represent a deep commitment to founding the whole language on object orientation, even when it seems silly to folks like me.

Was all the code they rewrote originally in Lua? So was it just a matter of moving from a dynamic language with pointer-heavy data structures to a static language with value types and more control over memory layout? Or was there something else going on?

I am not a typographer, and I’ve never used it in a professional capacity, but v1.6 (early 2024) improved Scribus a lot. I’ve used it and liked it for some personal projects for years, but the improved typography in 1.6 is big.