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- I'm pretty sure that I was the one that came with the idea for adding them to generic text widgets when I implemented that in KDE (originally to add spell checking in KMail, since spell checking in email clients wasn't a thing yet). At that time spell checking was only done in word processors. Pretty quickly every other environment, including Windows and macOS followed suite.by wheels
- > I'm pretty sure that I was the one that came with the idea for adding them to generic text widgets when I implemented that in KDE (originally to add spell checking in KMail, since spell checking in email clients wasn't a thing yet).
When was it that you added it to KMail?
Word '95 introduced the famous red squiggly underlines in 1995.
I believe KMail introduced spell-checking in 2004.
by andsoitis - I want to see yellow squiggles under logic errors. That will keep the programmers busy for a while.by analog31
- I actually implemented that! I have a private IntelliJ plugin that feeds markdown documents through an LLM and then highlights internal contradictions with the usual yellow background used for warnings. I use it when writing specs.by mike_hearn
- Blue rather than yellow colored squiggles, but ReSharper (and I expect JetBrains IDEs in general) kind of does this.
It can point out things like unreachable code, redundant if predicates, suspicious casts and countless other things through realtime semantic analysis of code.
Of course there are infinitely more kinds of logic errors that simple static analysis like this can’t pick up, but an LLM “analysis” might.
- Used to get slick ads for nightclubs and events from promoters with the red squiggles printed on them. Nice, full color, glossy, 4x6 card size ads that they'd stick on car windshields, hand out on the street, and stuff into any nook or cranny they could find. I was somewhat mystified as to what production process they used that allowed for the squiggles to remain and why what they were trying to indicate was ignored as most of the errors were indeed errors. Simply sending a document to a print device normally does not preserve the squiggles but somehow, they would end up in the adverts.
- I wish stories like this would be published before the nominee exits the stage.by yzydserd
- your wish will be granted when you dieby jatora
- > he accomplished this without the source code
Sure thing, who needs source code? This is HN.
But instead of reverse-engineering, I would just find or write an emulator, in case I would be asked to "port" another software.
It's actually sad that for the most part, we don't know who is responsible for the good and bad features of software we use. In movies, there is an extensive practice of showing "credits" at the end, and I enjoy reading them in detail. Software development should have the same culture (some games do, and then some "Easter eggs" do).
by jll29 - > I would just find or write an emulator
Nowadays, yes. Back then, systems could barely run the OS they came with...
by toyg - > In movies, there is an extensive practice of showing "credits" at the end, and I enjoy reading them in detail.
Thanks to huge protracted union fights. You’ll find the credits in an old US-produced movie—say, Gone with the Wind—are much more sparse than in one from the last decade or two. Incidentally, those fights happened too early to include CGI artists, and those often do go uncredited (undercredited?) even today.
Not that the Hollywood unions are a definite positive in all respects, or that the whole idea of fighting an oligopsony by establishing a monopoly in the shape of a cooperative doesn’t ring warning bells in my mind. But the movie industry absolutely would not credit most people if it could get away with it, and I wouldn’t expect the software industry to be any different (barring rare early pre-financialization examples[1]).
- Why can I always tell from the title of the submission and the microsoft.com domain that it’s Raymond? Love the guy.by alex_suzuki
- Prowrite on the Amiga had a real time spell checker before Word did.
Possibly there were other programs that did as well prior to that.
But Prowrite did it and had a red squiggly line under incorrect words.
https://www.atarimagazines.com/compute/issue123/P215_1_REVIE...
by sien - PC-Write on DOS had it as well.by aa-jv
- Are you sure about that? The page you link says that "The 100,000-word spelling checker lets you check a range of text, look up a single word, check continuously, and add words to the user dictionary", but doesn't mention underlining words. I also couldn't find a screenshot of that feature. Actually, with the AmigaOS 1.x color scheme, the squiggly lines would have probably been orange, because the standard color scheme was black/white/blue/orange (in AmigaOS 2 and above it was black/white/grey/blue to enable a 3D effect on the controls, so the highlight color would have had to be blue?!).by rob74
- I love these articles. Like. Of the million possible ways this could go, squiggles were the one, and it was from decisions of one man, on a whim. Yet, they completely change the world.by kumarvvr
- It went all of those ways, you're just finding yourself in the universe where it went squiggles.
- If you continue in this industry of software creation in a corporate setting, and you put your name into the source code, eventually you will become known for products/features that you never expected to become known for. And the things you had actually worked the hardest on and hoped to become known for will be lost and forgotten to time.
The process of creating things is completely within your control but the process of becoming known for a thing is completely beyond your control.
by Lendal - I have often felt that software should have a "Credits screen", like movies and video games do. For developers, QA staff, support staff, etc. I opened a bug to create one for our end-user facing software at my last job, but we never actually did it.by coldpie
- Amusingly, Chen's article refers to the Wikipedia page as evidence that Tony Krueger did the port. The article's evidence for that in its latest version? A link back to Chen's article...!by tom_
- Wait, that's illegal.by 1f60c
- Chen doesn't use Wikipedia as evidence that Krueger ported the game. He's pointing out that this is what Wikipedia mentions as most notable, and then adds another thing notable about Krueger, the squigglies. If you read the Chen's whole article, he adds more details about the port at the bottom, so he's clearly aware of it. It's fine to use the article as evidence for the port.
These kinds of circular evidence chains do sometimes happen on Wikipedia, but I don't think this is one of them.
- FWIW, the citation to Raymond Chen's blog is specifically in relation to the claim that it was reverse engineered from the MS-DOS port due to the source code being unavailable.
Prior to the edit there was a citation to the game itself for both Tony and Ed Halley as the game's development but the guy who added in the reverse engineering anecdote from chen's blog split the sentence so that the citation for the names of the game's developers is only applied to the other guy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Chip%27s_Challeng...
- To make the chronology clear:
• The Wikipedia page from before the reference to Chen's article was added: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Chip%27s_Challeng... — it cites two sources for "coded by Tony Krueger" ("About box from the game") and for "written [by Krueger] in a single summer" (a forum post).
• Chen's article mentions "Tony Krueger is remembered in Wikipedia as the person who ported…", then adds a footnote: “Probably not as widely documented is that he accomplished this without the source code: He reverse-engineered the MS-DOS version and then reimplemented it for Windows.”
• The Wikipedia article then cites Chen's article for this additional information.
It's all fine and proper. I've just edited the citation to make this clear again.
by svat - When you work in multi language environment the squiggles are often less than useful. They are just visual noise I must fight or ignore because the system tries to guess the language of the text I'm writing and it is most often wrong. And manually switching language settings between each interaction is way to inconvenient.by _whoDis
- Yes, I have the same problem. Some programs handle this better than others. The Affinity suite is esp. bad.by bambax
- While your point is valid, I think you are missing the point of the article.
The point was that someone the author was fond of passed away. The author who likely might be reading these comments. And Krueger did some cool stuff that everyone use without realizing who did it.
by Hnrobert42 - In firefox I downloaded dictionaries for all the languages I need. Of course at work microsoft outlook thinks it knows best and underlines every single word in my emails because I don't write them in the same language the UI is set to. Great help!by LtWorf
- At least in Firefox I can select multiple dictionaries. Firefox will ignore words that are a match in any of those languages, at the cost ofc, of typos that are in one language but not another so sometimes I'll right click and uncheck a language temporarily.
- On most systems I use I've managed to set it up so that I get spell checking in all languages I use. So I only get a red line if it's not a valid word in any of the languages, which is pretty useful.