#objective readability

technical knowledge,

familiarity with idioms and conventions and language that programmers use, and

trained cognition

it takes just to write any substantial software.

And more importantly, most importantly, very importantly: how unintuitive programming languages are, how much they perpetuate stuff that programmers have to be mentally broken into, that isn't obvious until you've had it explicitly explained.

Like "for" loops, the kind you find in C or Java, with two semicolons in the middle, are horrible interface design (if the goal is the best interface for humans working with higher-level concepts, rather than the best tiniest-increment improvement over previous methods for manually guiding the CPU instruction-by-instruction through an iterative loop). Python-style "for foo in bar" is much closer to reasonable. Could be even clearer if it was "for each foo in bar".

Do-while loops? Would be better if the syntax was `do ... repeat while`. Six characters could smooth the learning curve for that one construct profoundly.

Or was it "mrkdwn"?

Pause here to recognize that this is yet another problem with most abbreviations. It has been less than two week since I last saw this string, and I could not tell you if it's "mkdown" or "mrkdwn" if my life depended on it. I just remember that it was six letters of typical needless abbreviation bullshit. Gun to my head I'd gamble that it was the one without any vowels.

Again, this is a Hell's Kitchen for Programmers moment. If this was food Gordon Ramsay would tell you "oh fuck off" if you worked in his kitchen and brought him this shit.

God forbid we spend a couple extra characters in a string that is almost never manually typed and gets placed into huge plaintext JSON messages. No, no, please, continue micro-optimizing out two characters out of thousands.

What makes this worse is that "mkdown" or "mrkdwn" or whatever-it-was is NOT short for just "Markdown". No no no. It stands specifically for Slack's Markdown flavor, with Slack-specific extensions and incompatibilities. It's almost like they used the fact that it was their Markdown flavor as a rationalization in favor of a bullshit unique abbreviation, without even a hint of trying to critically loop that idea back on itself as a check, since no abbreviation of "markdown" suggests "our specific markdown" nearly as much as it suggests "the word markdown as generally understood, just abbreviated".

Anyway, what Slack should've done was call the message text type "markdown.slack.com" or something similar - that would have been extremely unambiguous and maximally helpful in several ways. It clearly indicates that it's the markdown flavor that belongs to slack (specifically the Slack that can be located at "slack.com", and not any other possible future or present or past use of the word "slack"). This indication in turn raises the alarm that their markdown is somehow different from normal markdown. They could put a precise description of their markdown flavor on a webpage accessible through the FQDN "markdown.slack.com". And you could throw "markdown.slack.com" into Google and trivially locate information about their specific markdown flavor.

s/.* href="\([^"]*\)"/\1/

versus

s/.* href="//; s/".*//

it seems like the underscore looking more like a space would be a pro?

At first glance yes, I thought so too, but an identifier has the job not only of separating the words that comprise it, but also of holding them together.

Compare

foo_bar_qux abc def_ghi

foo_bar qux oui_def wbh

foo bar_qux_poo qkw_wjw

versus

foo-bar qux wuw-uwu opa

foo-bar-qux htj ana-fra

foo bar-qux eie-jkl-meh

names_with_underscores

are objectively more readable than

namesWithMixedCase

and you can easily prove this to yourself by taking a long break from regularly reading each one in turn, and then getting used to them again.

Your return to reading underscored names is going to be almost effortless and instantaneous, no matter how long it has been since you last read them.

Trick question, because there is no way to answer that question in an acceptably small amount of time and overhead (short of already having the answer memorized or already having that file open with your cursor on the `setmode` function in an IDE that already knows about what's in those headers and can show you which one a symbol is from).

Third exit? What like a third variant besides normal exit and quick exit? That would be weird. Oh! No, it's thread exit.

If I was running a reality TV show like Hell's Kitchen but for software development, and someone brought me "thrd" as an abbreviation for thread this is where I'd say "oh fuck off" the way Gordon Ramsay does all the time.