In memory of the man who put red and green squiggles under words

(devblogs.microsoft.com)

119 points | by saikatsg 6 hours ago

6 comments

  • tom_ 1 hour ago
    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...!
    • snickerbockers 5 minutes ago
      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...

    • 1f60c 1 hour ago
      Wait, that's illegal.
      • dhosek 40 minutes ago
        There’s an xkcd for that but I’m on my phone and too lazy to look it up.
  • yzydserd 1 hour ago
    I wish stories like this would be published before the nominee exits the stage.
  • analog31 12 minutes ago
    I want to see yellow squiggles under logic errors. That will keep the programmers busy for a while.
  • apparent 50 minutes ago
    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.

    • joeframbach 36 minutes ago
      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.
  • O-K 2 hours ago
    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.