> I wonder why no plant evolved to use both and make the more even efficient use of light. These plats would appear dark, maybe almost black.

I have seen some black plants around where I live.

Doesn't mean they're photosynthesising with all frequencies of light though. Probably just pigment.

I prefer to use non-Unicode bitmap fonts on Linux. It works fine in programs that support them; unfortunately many programs don't support them in all contexts (in some cases, bitmap fonts work in some places but not others). When I write my own programs, I try to ensure that non-Unicode bitmap fonts work.

> I’m pretty sure the programmability of PostScript was a mistake. Adobe clearly thought that because most of it was removed from PDF.

I do not agree. I think the mistake was using PostScript as the output document format, not its programmability. PostScript should be the input format and not the output format.

I think PDF has many problems and is badly designed in many ways, though.

People do write in PostScript directly (and I have seen .NET and WASM code written directly, too). I use PostScript directly and so do some other people.

Absolutely. Years ago writing programs for *BSD/Linux, PS was the natural, most direct way to implement printing to printers equipped with a PS interpreter.

Fortunately the PS language was very well documented. That made writing PS pretty straightforward, at least for the reasons I was using it. Curiously other concatenative languages have been harder for me to grasp. Maybe that's because I regarded PS as a specific-use tool vs. a general purpose language.

If nothing else PS showed the value of excellent documentation. Lack of it probably accounts for many software project failures, particularly in the open-source world.

You can also run PostScript programs on the computer; you do not need a PostScript printer.

> Maybe that's because I regarded PS as a specific-use tool vs. a general purpose language.

In my opinion, it is both. Many of the programs I write in PostScript do not involve a printer at all.

> If nothing else PS showed the value of excellent documentation. Lack of it probably accounts for many software project failures, particularly in the open-source world.

I also find a problem with many programs that do not have good documentation. When I write my own, I try to provide documentation.

There are benefits of such things, especially if it can be handled by the compiler so that it does not make the code inefficient. In some cases it might even automatically convert the type, but often it is better to not do so. Furthermore, there may be an operator to ignore the type and use the representation directly, which must be specified explicitly (in order to avoid bugs in the software involving doing it by mistake).

In the example, they are (it seems) converting between Celsius and Fahrenheit, using floating point. There is the possibility of minor rounding errors, although if you are converting between Celsius and Kelvin with integers only then these rounding errors do not occur.

In some cases, a function might be able to work with any units as long as the units match.

> Public and even private functions should often avoid dealing in floats or integers alone

In some cases it makes sense to use those types directly, e.g. many kind of purely mathematical functions (such as checking if a number is prime). When dealing with physical measurements, bit fields, ID numbers, etc, it does make sense to have types specifically for those things, although the compiler should allow to override the requirement of the more specific type in specific cases by an explicit operator.

There is another article about string types, but I think there is the problem of using text-based formats, that will lead to many of these problems, including needing escaping, etc.

If you have a moral objection of enabling that feature, you might or might not also have a moral objection of the program having that feature, so I think not everyone does.

> The tab completion is very annoying when you’re trying to type.

I think it is annoying if it completes it by itself, but tab completion can be helpful if you have to push the tab key (or whatever other key is mapped to autocompletion) to make the completion to work (although I don't need LLM to do tab completion).

Do you not use the tab key to indent code?

I don't indent with tabs, but I also don't usually use autocompletion in the text editor. I usually use tab completion in the command shell.

In most code editors, hitting tab increases the indent even if you are using spaces (e.g. it will add two or four spaces). But now you don’t know if it will increase indent or arbitrarily rewrite your code.

Yes, which is why you could use a different key or key combination for auto complete.

Yes, this is especially useful if the boolean settings are stored in a bit field, in my opinion. In the case of Zed, according to the article, it uses JSON, but if a program uses a bit field instead then it would make sense.

There are other five bit character sets as well, such as the 5-bit Baudot character set and the 5-bit Zork character set. You could also use variable bits characters, or other bases of numbers.

You can also use other decks, e.g. with tarot cards you will have 78 cards rather than only 52 cards, and can make a longer message.

Other comments on here had mention doing other things such as face-up vs face-down cards.

Sometimes the specification is no good, and sometimes the customer requirements are different for many customers, in some cases being something which is less common (or that they try to make it appear less common (even to the customers) in order to try to be dishonest).