Dark mode to me harkens back to the days of terminals and mainframes. Light mode was popularized by the likes of Apple who believed in the wysiwyg philosophy. A document on screen should resemble its counterpart on paper.
But dark does seem to be in vogue once again. Something I did not see coming, much like how vinyl came back—which also tends to be a dark medium now that I think of it, though I can’t think of any reason it really needs to be? Hmm…
I also have a vague mistrust of non-alphanumerics in file extensions. Like while .c++ is fine, .cpp feels…safer?
I guess strxfrm and the like date back to a period in the 80s when symbol names had to be kept short for the compiler/interpreter’s sake. Like while BASIC back in those days technically allowed > 8 chr names, the interpreter only stored the first 8. In other words, the first 8 needed to be unique. As such, people tended to stick with <= 8 chr symbols to avoid interpreter issues. I think C allowed up to 31? But the culture of <= 8 prevailed nevertheless.
Then in the 90s, such restrictions were largely dropped in most languages, and symbol names ballooned in size to take advantage of this new freedom. In C++, you even had reserved words growing to the likes of reinterpret_cast around that time, but APIs just got ridiculous along the lines lengthy_class_name_followed_by_fully_spelled_out_method.
Today, people seem to have come to their senses and settled on more reasonable lengths, though not to 80s extremes. Like going back to C++, we have new reserved words like decltype and constexpr. In the 90s, these would likely have been spelled out in full like constant_expression?
I’ve spent decades programming C++. I wonder how it would’ve been had I started with C++11 or later? I feel like I had to do a lot of unlearning with that release which made things more difficult perhaps that they needed to be?
Similarly, I started Python towards the end of 2 and had to unlearn for 3. I seem to have bad timing in these things…
I think there’s a bit of rose-coloured glasses in this perspective? I don’t ever remember a time when people were all talking on the bus, headphones or not. You kept to yourself. Maybe in a small town? But random chatting with people on the street was never common in the big city. I mean c’mon.