Every time I click a Reddit link I'm astounded about how bad & user-hostile the new UX is.

Old-style link: https://old.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/5penft/parallelizing_...

If you have an account you can set the old style as the default. No email required to sign up even though they sort of make it seem one is, just hit next.

I use the Redirector addon to deal with other stuff, so it also helps without having to set up an account anywhere

The new UX is terrible, but note you can still minimize comments by tapping the white space to the right of the username. Horrible discoverability, but at least that is still there.

Ha! I didn't even notice the lack of [-] signs! I guess I never had a big need to do that...

Actually my biggest complaint is the lack of ability to maximize comments - basically, I detest having to click n times just to be able to read the whole discussion. There's a bit of content, and mostly SPAM on that page. Old design was mostly content.

I had to blink a couple of times and then google it to verify it wasn’t a joke. Wow.

To quote my favorite mathematician specializing in chaos theory, ”Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.“

> type ImmutableTreeListᐸElementTᐳ

> If you look closely, those aren't angle brackets, they're characters from the Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics block, which are allowed in Go identifiers. From Go's perspective, that's just one long identifier.

And the next comment is the same thing everyone else is thinking: “oh my god”

I also like this comment from the almost-empty /r/ProgrammerHumor/ submission linking to that thread:

  Gives new meaning to the phrase "Native apps"

To be fair I suspect this part of that sentence explains the reason for choice of these special character:

From Go's perspective, that's just one long identifier.

The designer was using those characters to trick the Go compiler which I then suspect means things like go format would also continue to work.

Then the designer could easily create a pre-processor that translates those placeholders characters as a way of providing some sort of generics in Go.

So in reality this was quite a good solution as I can imagine coming up with a solution that broke go format would have been a real pain to use.

> So in reality this was quite a good solution

Yes, I do not understand why people find this so hilarious. It's a clever choice.

Because they look like normal angle brackets. Unless you are in on the secret, you won’t understand why your code doesn’t work.

Easily fixed by using ᑅ ᑀ, ᕙ ᕗ, or ᗕ ᗒ.

For some values of "easily" and "fixed".

Maybe it’s just at the companies I’ve worked at, but replacement vars are usually double underscores:

    Here is __REPLACE__ var.

That is a clever choice.

A wise choice would be simply adding double underscores between the identifiers.

The fact that the author needs to explain how it works on an Internet forum is evidence it was neither a clear nor clever choice, but a probably a bad choice.

Clear is better than clever.

I like to know this:

> c++ allows 0-width spaces in variable names. Where's your god now?

I imagine many languages do the same, but I lack the will to test it.

Anyway, of course, it would be more correct if it was considered whitespace... And I bet anything parsed in Haskell or Perl6 does such.

See: https://go.googlesource.com/proposal/+/refs/heads/master/des...

> Why not use F«T»?

> We considered it but we couldn't bring ourselves to require non-ASCII.

Terrible idea, it would break that person's use case.

IIRC these characters are also used in the reference implementation from the proposal authors, of course.