Notices by Matt Campbell (matt@toot.cafe)

@skinnylatte Was that from a Chinese person or a westerner?

@ariadne Thanks for that clarification. I'm still inclined to go further by building stripped-down versions of dependencies for my specific application, but I won't use your post to justify it.

Question for #blind programmers: Are there any good accessible interfaces for viewing the output of a profiler?

@jason I wonder if it's mostly developers and sysadmins who choose to deal with more accessibility issues to get the otherwise better OS.

Also, I know you were active on the Emacspeak mailing list going back at least to the late 90s when I started participating in that community. I wonder how much you use GUIs as opposed to Emacspeak or other solutions these days. Emacspeak and text-console screen readers both have a steep learning curve for those used to GUi screen readers.

@glyph

@glyph

> individuals without full control of their technology stack

And note that this doesn't just mean people who can't install Linux because, for example, they're sharing a computer, but also people who can't practically use Linux because free software hasn't solved everything yet. I think it's safe to say that a lot of blind people, for instance, put up with Windows because, in some ways, it's the least bad platform with regard to accessibility.

@anna I went to RustConf in 2023 (in Albuquerque), when they still had a strong COVID policy (requiring proof of vaccination, a negative COVID test, and masking). I got to meet people in person, eat with them, etc., but came back home still healthy. Yes, wearing a mask is slightly annoying if one's not used to it, but there's always a tradeoff.

Came across this Hacker News comment by @rain which succinctly describes one reason #Rust's approach to ownership and borrowing is valuable: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39831978

> Which popular GC languages have mutexes owning the state they guard, such that it is structurally impossible to access that inner state without holding the lock? To do that you must have single ownership.

Posting for the benefit of anyone else who, like me, is sometimes swayed by the backlash against Rust.

@skinnylatte . I wonder if it also works the other way. I already have perfect pitch, but have never learned a tonal language. I wonder if it would be easier for me to learn a tonal language than for other adult learners.

Hot take: I think Rust makes it too easy to do lots of short-lived memory allocations. I don't know what language and/or library changes would have most effectively guarded against this. Maybe enforced manual drops instead of C++-style automatic drops. Maybe having to pass an allocator into every function that allocates. But it would be nice if there were something to nudge us in the direction of reusing long-lived allocations, besides just individual developers being obsessive about it.

@anna Then did the computing and informatics faculty have some kind of over-engineered infrastructure that was unreliable in practice? (I've done that before.) Or were they just incompetent?

@anna Was it because that faculty used self-hosted infrastructure while all the other faculties were on some big cloud service?

@cwebber Will these browser-based applications ultimately use HTML for the UI, or will they run a new UI toolkit in a canvas like the video game demos? That's the one thing that makes me worry about the call for new foundations; the existing web platform is already pretty good for accessibility, in particular. Of course, there's a way to make canvas-based UI more or less accessible, by constructing a parallel DOM. But it's tricky.

Just to make sure I'm clear, what I mean by line-oriented programs with linear control flow is that the program writes some output, then waits on some user input, and keeps going that way. Of course, there's branching and looping, but none of the complexity of event-driven GUIs, whether desktop, web, or mobile. Think of classic BASIC games like Lunar Lander or Oregon Trail (the original version). 2/?

It seems to me that some of the approachability that BASIC brought to programming, first on time-sharing computers and then on early personal computers, has never been fully recovered since the rise of the GUI. Sure, you can write line-oriented programs with linear (as opposed to event-driven) control flow in modern languages, but they're confined to running in a terminal, and most people find that arcane, especially since the rise of mobile devices. 1/?

So to fill a niche that seems underserved, I'm thinking of hacking together a little JavaScript front-end framework, tentatively called Basic.js (the name seems to be available). I would provide it as a template for users to use as the starting point of their project, consisting of a library JavaScript module (the titular "basic.js" file), a boilerplate index.html file, and a main.js file with a little boilerplate for the main program. 3/?

@inthehands Well, I got some negative feedback about putting those subsections in one big list, especially about the increased indentation and how that affects small screens. That was a somewhat weird structure anyway. So I backed that out and made the font size of h3 smaller. What do you think?

@inthehands Ugh. If the h2 and h3 styles are hard to distinguish, that's arguably the browser's fault. But if all the browsers have that problem, e.g. because they're all keeping slavish compatibility with something Netscape did in 1994, then maybe that's on me to fix.

I need feedback from sighted people about the website for my open-source project.

Here's the current version, using a third-party theme; I know the typography on the home page has problems: https://accesskit.dev/

And here's my proposed new version, using a minimalist template and CSS derived from an existing site (I stripped it down quite a bit): https://preview.accesskit.dev/

My main collaborator says the new appearance is from a past era. What do you think? Is it off-putting?

@david_chisnall How do you envision the framework being split between Rust and Lua? I mean, what would each language be used for?

About my last boost from @drewdevault, this makes me ashamed to consider myself part of the Rust community, especially since some of the comments he quoted in the thread were posted in places where the Rust code of conduct are allegedly in force (that is, it's not just Reddit and Hacker News). We've got a problem with tribalism in our community. I know it's not up to me to police the community, but still, what can we do about this?