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.

I haven’t used it in Apple’s ecosystem, so maybe I am way off base here. But it seems to me that it was Apple’s effort to evolve the language away from its systems roots into a more suitable applications language that caused all the ugliness.

There are so many ways to game the system, whom do you trust to enforce it? I don’t trust my own “side” to do so, and I sure as heck don’t trust the other side.

I am not a scholar of such things, but a quick glance at the documents I am familiar with suggests that the date ranges represent uncertainty within the compiler’s point of view. That’s reasonable, but when it’s linked out of context it’s not immediately obvious that it doesn’t reflect the range of debate in the broader secular scholarship, let alone secular and conservative religious scholarship taken together. So caveat lector.

That said, the breadth of documents linked here is really impressive.

Now if we used base 12 numbers instead of base 10, and we had a system of units based on that, I bet we’d have the best of both worlds. No idea if Napoleon could have imposed base 12 arithmetic on most of Europe the way he did metric, though.

Years ago, there were some development tools coming out of the Ruby world – SASS for sure, and Vagrant if I remember correctly – whose standard method of installation was via a Ruby gem. Ruby on Rails was popular, and I am sure that for the initial users this had almost zero friction. But the tools began to be adopted by non-Ruby-devs, and it was frustrating. Many Ruby libraries had hardcoded file paths that didn’t jive with your distro’s conventions, and they assumed newer versions of Ruby than existed in your package repos. Since then I have seen the same issue crop up with PHP and server-side JavaScript software.

It’s less of a pain today because you can spin up a container or VM and install a whole language ecosystem there, letting it clobber whatever it wants to clobber. But it’s still nicer when everything respects the OS’s local conventions.

Besides, I think this will create surprise and confusion for less technical users. In my experience, many will blame the incompatibility on whichever device is new, without understanding who is gating out whom. And even for technical users, consider CarPlay and Android Auto: From the phone’s perspective, the car is a peripheral, and that makes sense; but lots of people will still consider the car the “core device.”

I am not really a functional programming guy. But XSLT is a really cool application of functional programming for data munging, and I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t used it enough for it to click.

They adopted the existing Debian Free Software Guidelines as the Open Source Definition. The DFSG are good, actually, and represent an important community consensus outside the FSF.

I agree with your address example. That is user data, and it should be selectable.

Personally, I found the length of the quotes from politicians kind of tedious, but I sure wouldn’t want them to capitulate to Bloomberg after this.