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Admin
And back in the 90s, I was in a very famous TV show.
Admin
Once I was adding some new functionality to my co-worker's old tool, but it was constantly throwing errors at the parts written by me. I freely admit that I was just reproducing the pattern without really knowing language at the time, but it wasn't copy-pasting - new parts were different enough that I had to make them manually. Turns out, I'm near-sighted enough to confuse a period with comma in that IDE, and I had no idea which one it should be.
Admin
I hope Steve amended his program to allow both a double quote and two consecutive single quotes to be used equally expeditiously at the point Winston's problem manifested itself. Or anywhere else in the program, come to that. I believe this may fall under the general guideline of "pave the cowpaths".
Admin
The problems caused for computers by typewriters lacking keys for 1 (one) and 0 (zero), and the gymnastics of using l (ell) and O (OH) instead are something that I saw described way back near the beginning of my career, at the very end of the 1980s.
It comes back to long habit and so on, where the (less young) user's brain learns to write ell OH instead of one zero for ten on the typewriter, and the computer blows a gasket because the (younger) programmer never thought to take that into account.
Admin
10 and behold!
Admin
It's just occurred to me: how clunky and primitive does a UI have to be that demands a user enter quotes (either single or double) in order to execute a command?
Granted that in the 90s we didn't really have quite such a rich user experience as we do now, and GUIs were in their infancy, but at least the program should have had a slightly more friendlied-up UI so as to, say, request the user's input in separate lumps so they didn't have bits of the input to be delimited with quotes.
Maybe for internal programs the above is sort of acceptable, but for commercial outfits (one man or not), one would normally expect a higher standard. We definitely had the technology in those days, I remember it well.
Admin
The software seems to be some sort of installer maker (think InstallShield, NSIS, etc), so there may be cases where you would need double quotes to pass spaces to a sub program you're running as a command line argument.
Admin
Even cmd.exe makes a distinction between single and double quotes.
Admin
Error: unexpected token "'", expected """.
Admin
Muscle memory is a lot of the times the main reason for user error. They don't want to make a mistake but they can't help it and then aren't even aware of it. Sometimes a bit frustrating, hence I prefer these days screen-sharing only or live demonstrations.
Admin
@Steve - As a newbie programmer in the mid 1970s we dealt with this directly.
My employer's product was an accounting & inventory control package aimed at the small- to mid-sized generic wholesaler market. Users got a generic VT05-like CRT terminal on their desk connected by RS232 to a minicomputer down the hall. In many cases this was the first computer the company had owned, and the first computer keyboard the users had ever seen in real life, much less touched.
It didn't take long for our installation and user training crew to learn that they needed to teach the mysteries of one and zero and ell and oh and to not whack the CRT on the side at the end of each line. (Just kidding about that last one). Though we did also have to teach the idea that when filling in the equivalent of a modern multiline textbox, e.g. free-form Remarks, just keep typing; don't hit that new-fangled [Enter] key at the end of each line.
The older the user the harder these lessons were to learn. Many elderly bookkeepers had been typewriting invoices and paper accounting reports for decades with ells and ohs and could create tables of properly right-justified numbers at remarkable speed ... as long as they could use ell & oh.
Such fun times.
Admin
In another bit of history, it's remarkable how many different sets of special characters were available on even 1960s and 1970s typewriters, both manual and electric. And on how differently they were scattered around the periphery of the universal QWERTY keys.
Early teletypes, paper terminals, and CRTs continued the tradition that each manufacturer, and sometimes each model, shuffled where they put the e.g. forward slash, and whether or not they had an e.g. underscore or a square bracket. It really took the IBM PC to standardize the "computer keyboard", and even then we had (and still have) different versions for various national languages and for non-PC-based systems.
Admin
Me learning C: "Where did I miss a semi colon?!?!" "Where did I miss a curly brace?!?!?"
A least with C, Java, C#, etc., you have a complier to let you know. JavaScript (early JavaScript), it just wouldn't work.
Admin
| I hope Steve amended his program to allow both a double quote and two consecutive single quotes to be used equally expeditiously at the point Winston's problem manifested itself.
Sounds great until you run a string that gets passed to the SQL engine through your input replacement function. Turning two sequential single quote characters into one double quote character will have interesting effects on SQL statements.
Not that taking user input and passing it to an SQL engine isn't itself a huge WTF no matter the filtering that you put it through.
Admin
Don't forget typing exclamation point by typing a quote, backspace, and period. I think this was even perpetuated in APL.
Admin
In 1990, any DOS-based program was still using a fixed-space font. So ' ' didn't look like ".
Admin
When this story got to "Then Steve sat down at the very same computer, typed exactly the same things ... and everything was fine", it reminded me of another old story:
This guy complained he could log in if he was sitting down while he logged in, but not if he was standing up. Turned out someone had swapped two keycaps on his keyboard, and if he was sitting down, he hit the right (mislabeled) key from muscle memory. If he was standing, he typed the keys as he saw them.
Admin
The GEM-on-DOS based DTP program(1) I used in 1988 to prepare a large paper would like to disagree with you about fixed-space fonts. OK, it was running on GEM, but below GEM was MS-DOS.
(1) I think, probably, "Publish-It!", the US name for Timeworks Publisher. The timing is right, in any event.
Admin
Not that specific case, but there were plenty of overstruck operators in APL, notably grade up ⍋ and grade down ⍒ which are a vertical bar overstruck with an upward or downward triangle.
Admin
The real WTF is not to trust user input and also clear fail to be unable to process single quotes...
Admin
The only GEM based DTP program I have ever used - in fact the only GEM based program I have ever seen - was Ventura Publisher.
Admin
I remember as recently as the early 2000s, there were websites that would try to force all of their text to ASCII in the worst possible way. For curly quotes, ’and ” were mapped to ' and ", while ‘ and “ were mapped to ` and ``. It was unreadable.
Admin
Back in the mid '90s, in a tech support job, I had to explain double-clicking to a user once...
Admin
[quote]It's just occurred to me: how clunky and primitive does a UI have to be that demands a user enter quotes (either single or double) in order to execute a command?[\quote]
Let me introduce you to this thing called "MATLAB"
Admin
I actually saw this way back in the day. It was maybe 1980/81. We had an accounting package that ran on a no-name 8080-based PC. The woman at the client's office was in her late 60s, and had learned to type on a typewriter that did not have a 1 key, so she would use l (lower case L).
I changed the input validation to replace l with 1 and O with 0. It was easier that way.
Admin
Your post reminded me of a great piece on Medium regarding keyboards. Since apparently the last post I made with a link in it got deleted... Google "The curious case of the disappearing Polish S"
Admin
Also to underline something, you'd carriage return (w/o line feed) and progress over the same line, using the '_' as needed.
Admin
And even in the year 2020, 20 years after flying cars and regular trips to moon and Mars have become a common thing for everyone, young and old users still treat their office "productivity" programs like worse tyoewriters, using spaces to manually align text, and even multi-column pages are "easily done" that way... - yes, I've recently seen that in real life. "But I am a certified professional for IT systems integration! I paid €€€ for the certificate!"
Admin
You gotta love a language that allowed underscored letters as parts of variable names.
Admin
Back in 1978 just before embarking on a life of computer programming, I was a computer lab assistant. I had a typing class in high-school and the mechanical typewriters all did the L and OH thing for one and zero, some had the '. combo for exclamation mark. The lab had an Apple][ and a couple Commodore Pets as well as the ubiquitous Hazeltine terminals and a handful of DECwriters. We had a barrage of students sent to the lab to play Oregon Trail just to get them acquainted with using computers. At first I tried to explain WHY there was a difference between Ell and One and Oh and Zero. This was my first clue to not explain computer things to lay people. Their eyes just glaze over. Eventually I'd just tell the students "look! just use the One and Zero keys or you lose. Simple as that."
Admin
@TheGreatLobachevsky: Thanks for the reference. That was great fun. For very geeky values of "fun".
Admin
Monkey testing was not done. I.e just bash keyboard and check what the program does with gibberish input.
Admin
No worries, they're coming back. We had a freshpoop¹ who couldn't get their password to work. They came in to the physical helpdesk for assistance and… well, unlike on-screen keyboards, the physical shift key is not a sticky modifier.
¹ poop is the singular of people, right?
Admin
It for sure wasn't Ventura. Poor student and all that, and the Timeworks one was definitely more affordable for what I needed.
Admin
It would to your average non-programmer.
Admin
You're thinking of Intercal. Spark ' plus spot . becomes spark-spot a.k.a. wow !
Admin
Maybe Joel Spolsky did have a point when he suggested using monospaced font for input fields. (User Interface Design For Programmers, 2001-10-24)
Admin
I hope not, but I hope he added some better error message.
Adding alternative encodings have a tendency to explode into an unmanageable mess very quickly.
And single or double quotes are very often used for containing other chars to enforce literal interpretation, and doubling up on them are usually a way to escape them within them self.
Adding multiple ways will make that way, way more complex and likely introduce new bugs.
And for one single customer that you have already trained to avoid it, why go through the trouble.
If it was a regular problem, encountered often enough that you even add explanations in the manual and STILL have customers doing wrong, then you might consider it.
Admin
reminds me of a gag in an old online comic, "absurd notions": "gemtalnem, i an writimg this nessage to conplinemt you om your website." ... his practical-joker roommate had switched the "M" and "N" keys...