Please stop posting sensationalistic InfoWorld articles submitted by snydeq.

Yay.

Maybe not, now that I look back at it.

For is another word that would work: I wouldn't feel too anxious about that, especially for web programming.

With or in are probably best, though.

These are prepositions, any words that can fill in the blank in the sentence The squirrel ran ____ the tree, more or less: Up, down, around, about, in, out, to, from, off, and so on.

Conquerors and rich people mixed Latin and Greek into Anglo-Saxon way back when. There is no difference in meaning between, for example, get and obtain, any more than if I began saying the Spanish gato instead of cat. So we have lots of words that mean the same thing.

Respect is Latin, meaning look back. So when you say:

you mean I wouldn't feel too anxious about that, especially looking back at web programming or looking at web programming or thinking about web programming. Even other pure English prepositions, like with or in, would work: I wouldn't feel too anxious about that, especially with web programming or especially in web programming. Since you already said about, you can even just leave it out: I wouldn't feel too anxious about that, especially web programming.

Are they not interchangeable? Could you have said I wouldn't feel too anxious w.r.t. that, especially w.r.t. web programming?

What, then, are the differences between with regard to, with respect to, and about?

I think this misses the gist of his complaint, which was:

Note he said, "even the simplest thing." He means simple things, like showing the text of the article, just as he said. And though he also mentions something interactive, like pressing a button, I agree with him that simple things like sign-in forms and the button at the bottom of the form to submit it should be straight HTML submit buttons. Sure, decorate it with CSS, and check the whole form with JavaScript so that the user need not meet a big error page afterward and have to go back and type it all again.

You say:

If I take your sentence literally, it's false at every turn.

Later you say:

Checkboxes. Delete button.

And you mention a "slow connection." Few people have a slow connection anymore. But a slow connection will hurt an AJAX app worse than a single-transaction form that you fill out and then submit. On a non-AJAX form, checking boxes will still be instantaneous. On an AJAX form, clicking each delete link will seem sluggish. It's only on submit that the HTML form would seem slow.

Don't get me wrong. JavaScript is fine and can make things a lot better for the user, like field checking. Even AJAX is helpful in a lot of cases. But what the parent seemed to be saying, and what I agree with, is that on many sites all that extra stuff has made pages slower and flakier.

Then again, he wrote Git ;)

No, he just hated buttons, because in style he was a minimalist. To him buttons were clutter. Steve Jobs made computers for himself.

From the original post:

Yes, even in Web development, you can spend years using the same stuff. Many developers do, especially those writing in-house web apps at big companies. I've spent ten years in the IT department for a hospital group, and I've been slowly refining my skills with the same everyday tools since Day 1: Linux, PostgreSQL, Apache, PHP, HTML 4, CSS, and JavaScript. SQL gives me the most mileage, and it's the oldest. As I move what code I can from PHP to SQL, it shrinks, speeds up, and covers more situations.

I've never taken any classes in engineering or computer science. I've heard mixed opinions on their usefulness. My background in English, especially composition, helps me everyday. I recommend The Elements of Style, On Writing Well, and The Mac Is Not a Typewriter.

I'm more anxious about the overuse of acronyms. For example, w.r.t. stands for with regard to, a longwinded phrase for about. The word about is five keystrokes; w.r.t., with periods, is six --- plus all the keystrokes that I have to make to look up the new crop of acronyms.

Most people can learn how to write a program that works. Few master design. Paul Graham wrote a great essay on design that captures what I mean: Taste for Makers. This is crucial because, as Brian Kernighan said, "Controlling complexity is the essence of computer programming."

I've worked with just a few web programmers and interviewed just a few more. But in talking with friends and coworkers, reading articles, and in general just living in America, I get the impression that a sense of design is not a prominent part of American culture. In general we think that bigger is better, newer is better, and expensive is better. In general these are really bad criteria.

Then again, maybe it's that people can't even program. Jeff Atwood tells about how many programmers struggle with even simple FizzBuzz Questions:

Color me hopeful, but this looks like you went out of your way to misspell four words in a row.

It's much easier for a computer to get away with writing a poem than prose. The modern trend is to write poetry that sounds cool but no one understands. The same is true for modern songwriting.

P. S. Now get off my lawn.

Cortana is probably a new and better Clippy. But besides that, the rest seems like polishing the brass on the Titanic.

New folder icons? I remember visiting gnome-look.org for the first time ten years ago and being blown away: page after page of themes, icon sets, etc.

Start menu tweaked again? Why is this so hard? And it still looks awkward to me. Program names are inside squares, instead of just being text items in a list. Or small squares at least, like the launcher in Chrome OS.

I've used Mac since 1984, Windows since 95, and Linux since '05. I've either not minded or actually liked all of the iterations of program launching in Mac and Linux. But I have never, never, like the Windows Start menu.

Let's start with the word Start, which is where you go to Shut Down. Makes sense. And while it was a little more straightforward than today's shenanigans, it wasn't exactly pleasant to dig through. Plus, I was always stymied by why Windows took several seconds sometimes to me just trying to open the submenu --- not launch a program, just open a folder within the Start menu to see what's in there. It's like Windows was going to the bathroom, and I had to wait for it to finish even to answer a simple question.

And then there was the My everything fiasco, where Documents became My Documents, Computer became My Computer, and so on.

There is the trash can that they still won't default to the bottom right, because if you ever resize the screen, it messes up the position, since Windows calculates everything as the number of pixels from the top left, apparently. So they put the trash can in the top left. This never looked right to me. A trashy-looking thing like a trash can should be in a minor part of the screen (bottom right) even if they call it a Recycle Bin. The Macintosh somehow figured out how to do this 30 years ago.