It may very well be the case that it makes trade-offs that turn of lots of programmers but I don't think it's popularity directly implies it by definition, rather just that it implies there's something about it that prevents lots of programmers from taking it up en masse, and I think that's perhaps just the fact that it is so different from what everyone's used to and it takes some time to adapt to it enough to be able to appreciate the tradeoffs.
> But again, I suppose all the Lisp forms return values, and quibbling about the declarative : imperative :: expressions : statements mapping is just petty semantics
I would argue that it's very much not just semantics, or at the very least it's certainly not petty. The distinction has a noticeable effect on what the experience of writing code and on the reliability and related properties of the written code.
What is there not to understand? AI is booming right now. People are trying to get in on the gold rush and/or trying to sell pick axes to the miners. There is a ton of fertile ground for anyone that wants to try something, so it's being explored.
Arbitrary and random are basically the same in this context. The person you're replying to is pointing out they are specific keys for specific reasons because those specific keys can be used to figure out which kind of keyboard it is, they are not random or arbitrary, they are chosen with a specific reason in mind. If they were really chosen arbitrarily, they would not be able to accomplish the goal.
It seems to do this kind of stuff more when you're not looking too. Like I'll be approving edits all day without any problem then the second I set it to auto it gets a lint error about dead code and adds a pragma to allow the dead code instead of removing it, etc.