Simple language isn't just for children. It's also good for non-native speakers. Besides, even for those who can understand complex grammar and obscure words, parsing unnecessarily complex language takes extra effort.

In this specific case, I don't think the rewritten version of the document is infantilizing.

It's not useless, but the original document is aimed at expert craftspeople and there's a lot of content in the texture of it.

> Did Microsoft seriously deprecate BitBlt and 2D draw calls?

Very unlikely. Far too many applications depend on those things. It's more likely that they accidentally changed something subtle that happened to break colorForth.

If you're allowed to say, are you referring to the Windows 10 ports of the iOS apps that were done via Osmeta in 2016, or the earlier WinRT-native version? If the former, that was a non-starter for me and my blind friends due to deep accessibility issues, probably having to do with the Osmeta port/reimplementation of UIKit. Edit to add: And we wanted something that was easier to use with a Windows screen reader than the desktop website, particularly for Facebook proper.

> I still like it -- for systems programming, that is.

Just curious, what language(s) do you prefer for things that you don't classify as "systems programming"?

Go and TypeScript are both nice.

> the distinction is whether or not something enables me to perform a task, or whether it's just doing the task for me.

I think school has taught us to believe that if we're assigned a task, and we take a shortcut to avoid doing the task ourselves, that's wrong. And yes, when the purpose is to learn the task or the underlying concepts, that's probably true. But in a job environment, the employer presumably only cares that the task got done in the most efficient way possible.

Edit to add: When configuring or using a particular program is tedious and/or difficult enough that you feel the need to turn to an LLM for help, I think it's an indication that a better program is needed. Having an LLM configure or operate a computer program for you is kind of like having a robot operate a computer UI that was designed for humans, as opposed to having a higher-level program just do the higher-level automation directly. In the specific case of the Apache HTTP Server, depending on what you need to do, you may find that Caddy is easy enough that you can configure it yourself without requiring the LLM. For common web server scenarios, a Caddyfile is very short, much shorter than a typical Apache or nginx configuration.

When I perform a task myself, it will be reproducible, so it is done once and for all for this employer. That probably won't be the case for the LLM, which will change or might be down next week.

> there is no capital or material cost to push back against complexity

On a thread about software bloat and inefficiency, @josephg once speculated about an alternate universe where Moore's Law stopped decades ago. I've kept thinking about that. Unfortunately, I kept coming up with counterfactuals where important things like accessibility weren't as advanced or (relatively) widespread as they are in this world.

Shouldn't that make us want to fight to simplify our software stacks to the point where we can do analysis by synthesis, building from simple, well-understood parts, again?

You can certainly do that if you restrict software to be a mathematical artifact instead of an executable running on one of 3 kernels with different APIs and behaviors, let alone the mountain of dependencies your code will build and link against.

The reality is that the machines we write software for are complex, and trying to abstract it away and simplify it will introduce more abstractions that someone has to understand and deal with when they inevitably leak. It's not all bad, all this shit we're writing makes a lot of money.

Are you saying that frameworks might become less important because LLMs can just generate boilerplate code instead? Or do I misunderstand? Personally, if the vibe-engineering future that some executives are trying to foist on us means that I'll be reading more code than I write directly, then I want that code to be _doubly_ succinct.

This may not be what you're after, but note that egui and Slint have accessibility support (at differing levels of completeness), e.g. for blind people using screen readers, while Ribir and GPUI do not.

What is Sprite in this context?

I'm guessing the Fly Machine they're referring to is a container running on fly.io, perhaps the sprite is what the Spritely Institute calls a goblin.