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Just wanted to add that Nitro was built by Nik Bhatt, who was the Senior Director of Engineering at Apple leading the Aperture and Core Image teams. I believe he built Nitro specifically to fill the vacuum Apple left behind. Not sure how close it gets to the OG.

I generally agree with the sentiment—if something is free, there’s often a tradeoff. But when there’s a paid tier, the free version can act more like an entry point or hook to get users into the ecosystem, rather than relying on harvesting user data. In JetBrains’ case, broad adoption brings a lot of strategic value on its own (like establishing industry standards or building community mindshare), so it makes sense for them to offer a genuinely free version without necessarily treating users as the product.

I’m intrigued—what’s your setup? Do you use any advanced refactoring features like Change Signature or Extract Selected Members? It’s been a couple of years since I last tried setting up Java in VS Code, and I’m curious how far things have come. Intuitively, I’d expect JetBrains to have the upper hand in this area, since they can build specialized UIs for complex tasks, rather than being constrained by the limitations of the Language Server Protocol.

I agree. I've tried coding in C-like languages with proportional fonts a few times, and punctuation ends up feeling cramped, hurting legibility. We need more proportional fonts for programming where punctuation gets the same size and spacing as in monospaced fonts.

I'm also curious about this func/proc distinction and have some questions. It certainly isn't a new concept. Functional languages like Haskell have a similar distinction between effectful actions and pure functions. D also has pure functions that can only call other pure functions, but I'm not sure how well that has worked out in practice. Languages like SML/OCaml make it easy to write purely functional code, but I don't think the language enforces it.

1: Is there really no way to reuse procedural code in a pure setting? Say I have a procedure

    proc inPlaceSort(a: mutable IntArray) { ... }
Is there any way to use this proc to define a func that returns a sorted copy? For example:
    func pureSort(a: IntArray): IntArray =>
        mutable array_copy = copyOf(a),
        sort(array_copy),
        array_copy
Do I have to write two separate sorting algorithms? In Haskell I can implement both efficiently with a single implementation in the ST Monad.

2: Can pure functions perform logging?

3: Can a procedure declare some parameters as immutable or as output-only?

- Immutable parameters: often you will want to perform an effect with some context which you don't want to mutate. Const parameters are heavily used in C++ and Rust.

- Output parameters: these are parameters that are initialized by the callee and not the caller. Most languages don't need this as they can return one or more values instead, but C# is a language that has this specific feature.

4: Why invent a new term "expressive conditional" when "conditional expression" already exists? :^)

I'm aware of all of these monitors, but most are discontinued or unavailable. Luckily I've recently been able to acquire a used LG 5K monitor and it's pretty great most of the time, but my model has some display quality problems.

I have been waiting for good external Retina displays for years. That the situation has not improved after all this time is incredibly frustrating. Why is no display manufacturer [0] interested in setting itself apart by producing and marketing a lineup of reasonably priced external pixel-doubled (~200 ppi) displays? For some reason everything must be 16:9 and 4K with no regards to display size, resulting in some very awkward pixel densities. The fact that Apple is able to mass-manufacture a 5k display with a whole computer in it for just a little bit more than an UltraFine 5k is to me an indication that at least it’s technically feasible.

[0] There is LG, but these displays have their issues as the article explains.

Looks like a really great app! However, screen shots from older versions of Mac OS on a product page always make me a bit worried about the future of an app. Do you intend to update the UI and such to match Big Sur and the upcoming Monterey?

I don't understand how Telegram has managed to stay free for 8 (?) years until now. Was there ever a catch? Since the start it has continuously improved to become a feature-packed product that's easy to use, with a pleasant UI.