Automated features do not help when you are typing 80 words per minute

WARNING: THIS CONTAINS RANT LANGUAGE THAT MIGHT BE OFFENSIVE TO SOME READERS. HOWEVER, IT DOES INCLUDE A PROPOSED SOLUTION

In a lot of ways I miss the old days of computers. I remember when 5 megabytes was a huge storage space and in order to "paint" on the screen, the system needed to switch into graphics mode (otherwise the default screen position was one of a 128 characters set in a 25 x 80 matrix). All screens were green. Sometimes I have crazy thoughts: an amber screen is modern. In this bygone era Windows would not exist as a commercial product for another 8 years.

In the modern era of computers, where its terminology became household language, which began in about the year 1991, things moved much more rapidly. I remember standing in line at a post office in 1990 listening to two strangers talk about operating systems and peripherals. These were just regular people, I thought to myself. How would they know about this? Why were normies at a post office talking about such things! Hackers, the real legends, from the early times, were always appeased and we enjoyed our own secret world. We fed ourselves a constant stream of upgrades and improvements designed only for us. Then, something happened in about 1996.

Software designers began to be herded by corporate, and we were forced to "idiot proof" our beloved tools.

I remember one day I was typing and pressed enter in a new piece of software, and something bad happened. I was humming along, minding my own business, inputting source code, as fast as my fingers and the wind would carry. I don't remember exactly what piece of software I was working on when it happened. When all of a sudden the cursor did not go to the left margin when I pressed enter. It automatically indented itself!

"OH, DRATS!" I though to myself.

I knew right away that our private world had been invaded by outsiders. No longer would things be made to function for the expert. They would work for everybody.

Okay, freshmen software developer, we need to have a little chat now. I have waited 30 years to talk to you. I know that your parents were proud of you when you graduated with a computer science degree a few months ago. I never got one of those, nor have I ever hired anyone based upon its abundant merits.

Anyway, I f-ing hate autoindent. Do you understand me?

Try to imagine things like this, okay, I type maybe 80 words a minute, when I get a good tail wind and all green lights. That equals 1.33 words per second. Do you know how irritating it is to stop and correct for your "autoindent"? Sometimes as long as 10 seconds. That does not seem like much to many "outsiders", but to me it is an eternity and an interruption to my flow. By my calculations, for me to tab out to the desired location, under ordinary circumstances, takes less than 2/10th of a second. Hence, 10 seconds is 50 times longer than 2/10th of a second. FIFTY TIMES LONGER!

Also, to correct this automagical formatting error, sometimes I have to resort to using the mouse. This only adds insult to injury. We are talking total disruption here. And my chi is broken (whatever the F that means!)

Please add a configuration option to turn off autoindent. I know that it will be turned ON BY DEFAULT. I do not hold out any hope of changing this sad fact. But, don't bury the check box to disable it beneath 20 subscreens of feature settings. Yours is not the only application that I must fix this for, nor the only box that I work upon.

AUTOINDENT LEADS TO PLANE CRASH

In 1990 a very experienced pilot had just taken off from a Swedish airport on a routine passenger route. Unfortunately, the weather was sub freezing on the ground and the ground crew had failed to properly de-ice the wings before take off. As the airliner, carrying 250 passengers was just lifting off the tarmac the engines began to run a bit rough. The pilot, with over 20 years of passenger jet experience, immediately eased the throttle back and began to slow his rate of ascent. He knew something was up. He knew that ice was probably entering sliding off the wings and into the two rear engines of the aircraft and that it was going to start to damage the precision, high speed turbines if he did not slow the engines.

Unfortunately, a computer programmer had gotten his hands on the control system, apparently by executive decree of the aircraft manufacturer. Safety experts had reported that some pilots were lowering their throttles too much over populated areas to reduce noise pollution, and so the programmer had decided it best to boost throttles automatically when flying low over populated areas.

In the illustration herein, suddenly the throttles advanced themselves! The pilot was busy and did not notice, but in a few minutes all hell broke loose when the jet engines flew apart and the jet lost all power, hydraulics and electricity. The programmer had forced the throttles to autoindent and imperiled the aircraft with all of its passengers!

Luckily, the pilot was a hero and he managed to control the jet with the now defunct autoindent system, which had gone out with the electrics. He used the tops of trees to slow the plane and land safely on a small field. Whew!! All aboard were saved, despite Mr. Autoindent super programmer. Unfortuntely, the jet with autoindent was totaled.

Furthermore, another major issues that arises from lack of programming experience and industry leadership is the current security model for Internet account access. Since Google has taken my single signon work and wrongly applied it we now live in a world where virtually any hacker can steal your account. Unfortunately, the lemmings of the Internet have followed suit and adapted this ridiculous model. Explanation, I use a password vault and I generate strong passwords that are usually between 12-20 characters in length and include numbers and punctuation. However, with the Google model we are now often times required to supply a secondary means of authentication, such as text messaging.

Occasionally, I may be required to receive and respond to a text message containing a code. As I am in Mexico, sometimes these messages can take 30 minutes to arrive. But, 5 minute count down timer that expires the code long before I receive it, was not written for my country. Now I am perhaps locked out of my own account. Meanwhile, Mr. Hacker in the United States who went to a weekend hacker conference and knows how to exploit plain text SMS message vulnerabilities, a trivial problem to solve. He then contacts Google and resets my password with this extremely insecure secondary method of access! Myself, the owner is locked out, but Google rolls out the red carpet for Mr. Hacker to steal my account. Suddenly, my impossible to guess, 15 character password that contains non alphanumeric characters is USELESS and easily beaten.

The new security model is designed and built for idiots and half whits, such as Donald Trump, who uses "your fired" as has Twitter password. A true story! By Google and other Gates run companies idiot proofing their websites, Mr. Gates and others has reduced the quality of these companies to serve the lowest common denominator and eliminating the once professional appeal of the "My password is king" model. Professionals will know exactly what I am talking about. If you do not, this is simply because you are not an industry professional.

NONE of my websites and web services do require javascript to preform basic functions and your password is sufficient guarantee that you own that account. No one will ever take that away from you as long as I am in charge.

An extended and reliable security model is know, have are. I know something, a password. I have something, a USB, I am something, my fingerprint. If these were commonly implemented on all web applications and devices, we would have very little hacking, SIM swapping and theft of our valuable information. Yet, people are too untrained or too inexperienced to understand these basic systems of authentication and common sense. They have taken the easy approach that satisfies most users and offended the more experienced developer community.

In the mean time, my passwords are not the same as everyone elses. I am not Donald Trump, using ‘your fired’ as my password (yes, he really did that) Yet, the bar is lowered and I must conform to the liability created by incompetent users. My password no longer guarantees me access. In fact I have run into other Google like systems where my secure password is irrelevant. Instead the website has decide that facial recognition is more important, or my geolocation or some other arbitrary metric that they have adopted as their pet method of challenging a login.

Don't get me wrong, I think that facial recognition is a wonderful secondary method, and may even become the primary method for access in the future. But security models I see today lack uniformity and lack a standardized approach. What the software industry needs is leadership and under Bill Gates we suffer from a sort of autocracy within the tech world.

Why don't companies recognize that all users are not equal in their level of sophistication? Why should I be treated like a beginner and not someone who has invested in a solid password manager like KeepassX. I literally know and believe, because I have seen it happen, that my password could actually get me locked out of an own account! I was in a Hong Kong hotel in 2017 doing my job for my solar company when I was locked out by Google, permanently, for using the correct password to login from the wrong country! Yes, the algorithm written by some noob admin at Google figured that hackers on the other side of the world had gotten my password and now that account is forever frozen.

And that is the crux of the problem. Programmers who lack experience are starting to run our world and there is no tech leadership to inspire and guide us.

In all of my websites that I build, if you have the password, YOU ARE THE KING OF YOUR ACCOUNT. I will never, ever, ever lock someone out of an account after they have given a correct password. This is a wrong and terrifying practice undertaken by the young and innovative minds. If you have the right password, THEN THAT ACCOUNT IS YOUR ACCOUNT!

While I am on terrible ideas, is anybody going to say anything about JavaScript? WHAT A P-O-S! JavaScript is the most rickety piece of junk ever constructed. It is a language that if an artist were allowed to invent a programming language, that is what they would invent. Yet, our entire Internet has been built around it! It is the only universally adopted language to run in a browser, but such trash! It blocks process constantly and then crashes everything. It is easy to hack, lacks a security model and is as secure and reliable as a plastic toy.

Finally, new features are not always good. Maybe if you had a little more experience before they gave you those big boy pants jobs, you would have known to think things through a bit more before taking action. To all committees and executive leaders, kindly take great care in authorizing such additions and add-ons. If anything added to "automate things" might impair the base functions of a tool being used by professionals, then that thing should perhaps be disabled by default. If the beginner is really committed, then perhaps he aught to explore things a bit more before venturing forth on new legs.

Computer Programmers By Work Experience Level (school years do not count):

BEGINNER: 0-12 YEARS

INTERMEDIATE: 13-25 YEARS

ADVANCED: 26-40 YEARS

EXPERT: 40+ YEARS

In order to be regarded as an expert in computer programming, one must know WELL a minimum of 15 programming languages. There are exceptions to those in this table, but they are rare.

Thank you.