Amen.

The "loud pipes save lives" myth has been debunked many times. Hi-viz clothing and a modulating headlight (and in the case you present, not riding in a blindspot) will do a whole lot more to prevent accidents than making more noise.

Yet.

If Apple had indicated that they were fully transitioning to ARM in six weeks, there might be cause to have this discussion. The timeframe indicated is measured in years. That seems like plenty of time to figure these things out (for both Apple -- and MS, who now have a serious reason to re-consider their ARM offerings). Rather than get stuck in the mindset of re-implementing Bootcamp, perhaps there's some more interesting work being done?

I dunno. There's always a lot of speculative doom and gloom around Apple (e.g., "They're not going to allow us to install software!") that seems like bullshit.

From the post you replied to (emphasis mine):

Amazon has so much choice (and so little selection) that sure, if you know what you want it might be useful; if you're bookshopping for discovery, a store where the books have been selected is often a better bet. The reality is that most indies will order up whatever you're looking for anyway.

Abe Books is a subsidiary of Amazon. (Alibris, however, is not.)

Oh sure. I was struck by the use case that I quoted because it's one of the things I very much do with an iPad. I don't think there's one solution for everyone. Nor do I buy into the canard that tablets are only for consumption. Mileage varies!

Mosh will resume indefinitely long interruptions. It's pretty slick.

I dunno: the iPad is a whole lot more portable than the VT-100 I started out on. If you're using text based utilities anyway it's pretty usable with Blink (a mosh client) when you're doing the actual business of programming on a remote server somewhere. Especially now that keys can be remapped on Apple's existing external keyboard; emacs is usable without trying to undo 25 years of muscle memory.

Programming isn't why I bought the iPad — stage management is, and in that space it's a game changer — but I've been happily surprised that it fills many of the roles the laptop had (both being adjuncts to my primary work desktop).

I agree 100%. No BS, full REST support, and cheap (for what I do anyway). The folks I've interacted with have also been on their game. With luck this isn't any more than an organizational tweak (though I echo your sentiment about it being unfortunate to see people out of work).

Poor Joe Armstrong must be rolling over in his grave reading the snippet you quoted. Thanks for reminding the masses that some of us have looking down on non-functional programmers for decades now. (I kid, mostly.)

I'd mention that CPAN (and it's namesake predecessor CTAN) have been around for the last two decades too. Software package distribution might not have been mainstream but it wasn't unheard of back in 1998.

The iPad has a pretty decent User Guide: https://support.apple.com/guid...
with details on the darker corners of the default applications. Likewise, apps like Pages and Numbers have comprehensive manuals. I’m not making the claim that this is better than Balloon Help (your mention of it brought me back) and I’m certainly not making the claim that there’s anything intuitive about gestures like “pinch with five fingers while rotating counter clockwise and dragging to the upper left” but the information is available.

(Some of Apple’s “consumer” apps like GarageBand and iMovie have tooltips that can be turned on by tapping the ? icon. It’s a behavior that would be useful in more places.)

Third party apps are pretty hit or miss though. Omnigraffle, for instance, is well documented where Blink (a mosh/ssh client) is tragically lacking. Maybe that’s why Omni’s products are so expensive.

One nice iPadOS feature is the keyboard command overlay that appears when the command key (on an external keyboard) is held down. I wish MacOS had a similar, optional behavior.

Anyway, I don’t mean to sound like an Apple apologist: there’s a lot of work that could be done for discoverability. It’s not entirely bleak though and I’d rather have functionality that I have to dig into a manual to find than not have the functionality at all.

I'm not going to change anyone's mind; I just though that maybe someone should point out that when you feel the need to qualify a 300+ word anti-gay screed with "I'm not a bigot, I'm really not" you actually might be.

Actually that's exactly what you are. Why not just own it?

It seriously isn't. Fastmail (for instance) is $60/year — say 40 minutes of labor if you're billing $100/hour. I sure can't setup and maintain a full featured, no maintenance email system in 40 minute/year.

Huh? As a dev my use case primarily involves zsh, Emacs, Erlang, and PostgreSQL and all that's running just fine on MacOS thanks. I'm really curious what your use case is? I mean, you make it sound like you've maximized the iTunes window and don't know how to quit the application.

I couldn't agree more. As you point out, the keys are in the right place; I'll add that they've got a hell of a lifespan: one of mine is 19 years old and still going strong.