In memory of the man who put red and green squiggles under words
devblogs.microsoft.com262 points by saikatsg 11 hours ago
262 points by saikatsg 11 hours ago
> Tony was an early fan of the magic/comedy team Penn and Teller. A friend and colleague attended a show and hung out afterward to ask the duo to sign a photo for his friend Tony. “He was on the team that did the red and green squiggles in Word.”
That’s some heavy duty corpo-brain to be introducing your friend with ”He was on the team that did X”.
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...!
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.
Wait, that's illegal.
There’s an xkcd for that but I’m on my phone and too lazy to look it up.
Citogenesis!
Can't believe we got to see one in the wild, and with clear attribution to boot.
I have left comments on HN and Reddit and then found them rolled into Google's AI search summarizer OR the knowledge box with _extreme rapidity_ such that when I went, mere moments later, to go re-check some fact I had cited, I found my own comment at the top of the results, repeated back to me, but with authority and gravitas, ensconced in the austere trappings of the knowledge box.
in addition to a relevant xkcd, there is also a Wikipedia article about the phenomenon and a behind-the-scenes list
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circular_reporting#On_Wikipedi...
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_citogenesis_...
- previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35535407
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.
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.
I used character styles that set the proofing language with hot keys assigned, so shift-alt-1 sets to English, shift-alt-2 to German, etc. As character styles they apply both to the current insertion point when typing or any selected range (e.g. when I forgot to set it proactively and now have a line spattered with wiggles)
Or just set the proofing language for the entire text to None to banish all spelling and grammar diagnostics.
Why can I always tell from the title of the submission and the microsoft.com domain that it’s Raymond? Love the guy.
I wish stories like this would be published before the nominee exits the stage.
I wish there was a button on my keyboard that I could press when there's a red squiggle in the last N words, which would cause my computer to fix the underlined word to its best guess. It should wait until a few words later, to get more context. It should flash the new word as it's being inserted, so I can easily see what it's done.
Spell check used to be kind of lousy, but with AI I imagine it would have a very high rate of accuracy in context. I am greatly slowed down by having to delete a few words/chars every now and then, and if I could just smash a key and go on my way, it'd be much more efficient.
> with AI I imagine ...
I think that might be just imagination - android autocorrect in particular got sufficiently worse that I finally turned it off (I still use it as a "typing assist" - it only displays choices that I can tap to replace, or (more often) ignore.)
What I mean is that if I entered a sentence into ChatGPT/Gemini/Grok and tell it to fix the flagged word, it will be able to get it right almost all of the time (assuming it's not a weird proper noun or inside joke slang).
Most mobile keyboards will do autocorrect as you describe it, and show top-N alternatives when you go back and tap on the autocorrected word. I prefer this to it mocking my mistakes and making me pay penance by manually accepting the correction.
Yeah I'm thinking about my desktop computer. Also, I find that the autocorrect on my phone is not that good, especially when the first letter is incorrect.
macOS at least will autocorrect stuff by default... I typically turn it off within a few days of a fresh install after getting annoyed by some correction I didn't want.
I prefer the opposite since it absolutely trashes proper nouns and makes it extremely annoying to type bilingually.
The worst is when it automatically corrects, you delete the correction and type the exact same thing, then it automatically corrects to something else, repeat.
I want to see yellow squiggles under logic errors. That will keep the programmers busy for a while.
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.
F7 gang standup!
When did the squiggles disappear? I do miss the variety in text formatting. You used to be able to animate text in Word and have squiggly double underline in different colours. Everything now is sans serif, sans variety.
Another thing that has been completely broken by Microsoft over the years. Spell check in Word today is absolutely godawful, it generates more false positives than true positives by a massive margin. Shit like "the" having a red squiggle. Drives me insane as every time I see it I think about how far software has fallen.
Teachers put red squiggles under misspelled words long before Word.
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