Good post. I'm with you on the "I'll take my programming with strong typing and lots of built in idiot-proofing." Personally, I view writing unit tests as an extension of that mentality. I think of it as writing the code twice: write the code (the actual system), and write what the code is supposed to do (the tests). If they don't match, I've done something bone-headed. As long as the tests are part of your build, it's exactly like augmenting the compiler checking. I can't tell you how many times writing tests have caught my own bone-headed mistakes, even in "too simple to be wrong" cases. I'm no TDD fanboy, but in my experience writing tests usually pays for itself pretty quickly timewise.

You mentioned a situation where a refactoring would have been great, except it would break 50 other tests. When I read that, I thought your tests probably did you a favor: that seemingly trivial change would have actually caused a lot of other failures that you didn't expect. Unless the unit tests were badly written. I've seen that before, and yeah... badly written unit tests are as much of a nightmare to maintain as any other badly written code, but without the benefit of providing any customer value! If someone's only experience with unit tests is a poorly written test suite, I can totally understand how that'd sour them on the TDD concept.

Seems to me that raising tariffs would make the foreign products more expensive for American consumers, enrich the tax collectors, and probably not really change the foreign manufacturers' behavior at all. It's not like the foreign manufacturer has to worry about American competition that much, assuming the article summary's description of how it's too expensive and risky to do manufacturing in the US these days is true.

The tax collectors will almost certainly be on board with that solution though.

Heh, good point. My initial reaction was "Thank you Roland! But our princess is in another castle!"

I admit I was disappointed by the ending at first, but on thinking about it, it was probably the most sensible way for it to have ended. To the extent that sense applied to those books in the first place, at least. I otherwise enjoyed the books quite a bit.

Just a nit-pick: I think the 'infinite-dimension' effect of corners you mention only applies to the corners of the screen, not to the corners of windows. The idea is that corners are very easy targets to hit with the mouse pointer because the pointer is constrained within the edges of the screen. Unless the mouse pointer is constrained to stay within the bounds of the window, there's no 'infinite-dimension' effect in this case.

I agree with your other points about familiarity and misclicks though. I personally think the color scheme is an improvement, but usability is very different from aesthetics.

Happy to see them at least trying to improve though. Hopefully they'll see reason and put the close button in the corner, at least. :)