>Sigils are why I gave up learning PERL. Everything I learned had a half life of 10 minutes.
Interesting! By "half life of 10 minutes", do you mean the language was changing too quickly under you or that it was difficult to remember the sigils?
* that communicates meta-information about the word.
He gives the example of `echo $USER`, where `$` is a single that communicates that `USER` is a variable, presumably with some contents. Thus, I'd wager `$` is a sigil in `$foo`.
Thanks for the Austral spec link! Programming languages come and go but I find it deeply interesting when language designers lay out the rationale behind possibly outlandish decisions in their programming languages. Case in point, Larry Wall and Perl-y languages [0]
>Programmers familiar with the use of sigils to indicate variables intrinsically grok this phrase, but it looks like gobbledygook to non-programmers.
While I understand where you're coming from, I'd argue that programming-related concepts are all "gobbledygook to non-programmers", that's to be expected. Having something like (this is close to valid Raku but it's not)
Positional[Any] ages = [42, 38, 25];
doesn't make it any easier than
my @ages = [42, 38, 25];
unless you already have prior knowledge of arrays, assignments, types, etc.
>During sleep, your brain restructures and reorganises information, creating links between unrelated ideas. This leads to new, creative ideas that you use in your day to day to solve problems and write better software.
This reminds of the character Ko Murakami in the manga World Trigger, who can master anything after trying it once and then sleeping on it. Great read if you like manga around strategies and battles.
>You see, under ‘Delivery’, the checkbox is always set:
As soon as I read this, I was expecting the checkbox to be always checked and grayed out without the possibility of being checked out. It doesn't seem to be the case at the moment, according to the screenshot. As others have pointed out, I don't think this is a dark pattern.
[0]: https://github.com/benweet/stackedit
[1]: https://github.com/benweet/stackedit.js