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Word processors such as Microsoft Word are said to be WYSIWYG: what you see is what you get. In a sense that’s true, but in another sense markup languages such as HTML or LaTeX are really WYSIWYG. Text files are simpler because there are no mysterious forces at work.
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TL;DR: for text files, notepad is WYSIWIG. For a completely useless definition of WYSIWIG.
I might be monday-morning-dense, but what'st the point?
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peterchen wrote: for text files, notepad is WYSIWIG
For executables, blue screen of death is WYSIWIG. Yes, there is no point.
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I think the point was that proprietary wysiwyg editors like Word interject an intermediary layer to do their magic that work fine for most users... until they don't. I've had Word docs corrupted or choke on some formatting and there's no easy way to figure out how or why it's that way. And how to fix it.
That's well and fine for most people most of the time.
Text files work better (in some ways) if you know what you're doing (HTML or Markdown or LaTeX or...) and the "what you see" is as important as the "what you get". Ever seen the HTML output from Word? Can you imagine what's happening inside the DOC/DOCX file? Yikes.
Back in the day we used FrameMaker for publishing and even though we did most work in the wysiwyg editor, the text-based file format was a blessing for troubleshooting problems.
There's also the concept - which I subscribe to - that many features wysiwyg editors give us are extraneous to the content and complicate more than they help. Plain text, Markdown, simple HTML markup make for more portable files, more focus on the content and, these days, can be easily and quickly parsed for fancier presentation formats (web pages, HTML/CSS slides, etc.) when necessary.
Director of Content Development, The Code Project
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OK, that starts to make some sense.
Terrence Dorsey wrote: Ever seen the HTML output from Word?
Yes, and I've been around when WYSIWIG became a distinguishing feature.
For me, at the heart of WYSIWIG, is the user interacting with the result itself: e.g. instead of a list of picture names and subtitles and format instructions, they are interacting with a photo album. It *removes* the user interface from perception: instead of clicking a button that makes the text bigger, they make the text bigger.
Of course, all abstractions are leaky (or, as D.A. said it, "The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair"). So yes, being able to delve down can be a life saver.
In the end, tghe real life analogy is also limiting - which isn't always bad, humans like handrails. It might help focusing on the really important stuff, like finding a funny title for the 57th picture of Jon and Kiran pouting.
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It also occurs to me that we see the circle complete itself again with tools like jsFiddle[^] or Multimarkdown Composer[^], which blur the line between code, markup and WYSIWYG.
Or even IDEs that autocomplete your code right down to the semicolon.
Quote: Yes, and I've been around when WYSIWIG became a distinguishing feature.
Indeed, I recall doing my writing and markup in WordPerfect and handing off to the desktop publishers for formatting. Man, I dreamed of better WYSIWYG tools. And they arrived, after a fashion. But all the WYSIWYG features in the world don't make page layout in Word any less soul-destroying. And now I find myself back in a (slightly more sophisticated) text editor, handing off to publishing tools only when necessary.
What's old is new again.
(And what an interesting discussion sparked by such a poorly written post!)
Director of Content Development, The Code Project
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Though C has been around for decades, it's still consistently ranked at the top of any list of programming languages used and studied today. I recently spoke with David Griffiths, coauthor of Head First C, about the reasons for C's continued (even increased) popularity. Respect the classics, man!
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On Saturday, at midnight Greenwich Mean Time, as June turned into July, the Earth’s official time keepers held their clocks back by a single second in order to keep them in sync with the planet’s daily rotation, and according to reports from across the web, some of the net’s fundamental software platforms — including the Linux operating system and the Java application platform — were unable to cope with the extra second. What did you do with your extra second?
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I time traveled, of course.
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I wrote Tumblr, Instapaper, and Second Crack in PHP. I continue to use it because I know it extremely well, it’s very easy to use and deploy, and it’s nearly maintenance-free on servers. When you’re a programmer forced to also be your own sysadmin, that’s very attractive. But I hate it. It’s limited, often clunky, outdated, and deeply flawed. When comfort and speed get in the way of becoming a better developer.
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What’s keeping us using desktops and even notebook, then, are corporate buying policies, hardware replacement cycles, and inertia. How long before the PC as we knew it is dead? About five years I reckon, or 1.5 PC hardware replacement cycles. Nearly all of us are on our next-to-last PC. Mobile devices are moving on down the road.
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I don't know too many iOS and Android developers who develop code using iPads and Android tablets. Trust me, the laptop/desktop isn't going to go away anytime soon. 
/ravi
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Perhaps you think that Twitter today is a really cool and powerful company. Well, it is. But that doesn’t mean that it couldn’t have been much, much more. I believe an API-centric Twitter could have enabled an ecosystem far more powerful than what Facebook is today. APIs versus advertising: only one can win?
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When the iPad first appeared on the market, publishers immediately saw its potential as a media-consumption device. Indeed they were right: iPad (and tablet) users are more likely to buy content than smartphone users. What they were not right about though was that native apps were the right vehicle to break into this market. A number of high-profile publishers have been recently abandoning native apps in favour of the mobile web. Learning lessions from 500 years of non-proprietary print.
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In artificial systems it seems we need a new and broader definition of self-awareness - but what that definition is remains an open question. Defining artificial self-awareness as self-recognition assumes a very high level of cognition, equivalent to sentience perhaps. But we have no idea how to build sentient systems, which suggests we should not set the bar so high. And lower levels of self-awareness may be hugely useful and interesting - as well as more achievable in the near-term. Why are we fighting to save the humans? They're a primitive and violent race.
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There are two end-user computing devices I hold in the highest disregard: all-in-one PC desktops and thin clients. While they both apparently have their place in the information technology ecosystem—preferably far away from me—they also carry with them a hidden message to the poor worker drone stuck using them. Your boss doesn’t think you’re worth spending money for a real computer. Green screen of dread.
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Apple: Make the iPhone 5 Ethically.
Quote: Reporters have documented cases of deadly, preventable, explosions at iPad factories, and repeated instances of employees dying of exhaustion after long shifts [...] while Apple makes hundreds of dollars of profit on each iPhone or iPad it sells, only $8 and $10 (respectively) goes to the workers that make it.
Think they're screwing you by overcharging you? They're screwing the workers who make the iPhone a great deal more.
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Definitely the right sentiment.
Now how about we do this for the whole industry, not just the poster child?
cheers,
Chris Maunder
The Code Project | Co-founder
Microsoft C++ MVP
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WikiLeaks Enters the Music Business.
The album, "Beat the Blockade", has 12 songs and is available via iTunes, but not Amazon (the website originally responsible for taking down the Wikileaks site). Funds spent purchasing the album will go toward supporting WikiLeaks.org.
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Won't be long till Apple removes it from ITunes 
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I would not be surprised. Apple did remove a WikiLeaks app from the app store for a pretty bogus reason.
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One person's concept of the best companies. A number of them state that the pay is not so great. That should lower them out of the running for the best.
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Clifford Nelson wrote: A number of them state that the pay is not so great. That should lower them out of the running for the best.
that would be, as someone once said, "one person's concept" of what makes a company great.
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