"Is it punchcards? ... ". Effete modernist. I programmed using punched paper tape for input, often patched with scotch tape. Beat that, horse'n buggy braggarts. Is there any correlation between love of coding and love of crossword puzzle solving?

I stumbled into actually reading your blog a few weeks ago and have been browsing. Nice work. I laughed at "... continue to ignore the other umpteen dozen tiny little ways your product annoys the people who use it on a daily basis ...". You need a special section for QuickBooks, the worst commercial software in the universes. Anyway, back in the day, 1972 to be exact, my professor of computing science taught me that the only part of software creation that was not clerical was design of the human interface. I think that's roughly equivalent or perhaps complementary,to what you say in this article and it has stuck with me through 10 years of programming, a 20 year side trip as a lawyer, and now back to coding, just for fun. Just now I wandered through your post on the 2 classes of programmers. Some days I'm in the 80% some days in the 20%, but I'll tell you one reason why the 80 percenters often ignore the 20 percenters, and sometimes loathe them - they do not pay attention to the interface. When an 20 percenter wants me to try code which is written to his personal standards, complete with weird stuff assigned to function keys and the right mouse button, input controls in non-standard areas, or god help me, 'command line options', I say no thank you please, call me when some other sucker has spent 2000 hours sorting this out. And I still press f2 in QuickBooks when I want to edit something, and get some wanky QuickBooks thingy, and curse.

WordPerfect. Alt-f3. Great pity that the lemmings all rushed off the appalling MS Word cliff. WordPerfect appears to be stale and moribund. But even so I remain loyal.