8 ms·
> it's even worse that they landed on // for the syntax .. it is using \\
by n42 1y ago
> it's even worse that they landed on // for the syntax
.. it is using \\
- hinkley 1y agoI worked with browsers since before most people knew what a browser was and it will never cease to amaze me how often people confuse slash and backslash, / and \ It’s some sort of mental glitch that a number of people fall into and I have absolutely no idea why.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- Twey 1y agoI wonder if it's dyslexia-adjacent. Dyslexic people famously have particular difficulty distinguishing rotated and reflected letterforms.
- hinkley 1y agoCould be. The frequency is such that it could be dyslexics. It's not all the time, but it's a steady rate of incidence.
- quesera 1y agoI think in the 90's it was just people repeating a pattern they learned from Windows/DOS. It used to grate on my nerves to hear people say, e.g. "H T T P colon backslash backslash yahoo dot com". But I think they always typed forward slash, like they knew the correct slash to use based on the context, but somehow always spoke it in DOSish.
- Mawr 1y agoI doubt those very people would confuse the two when presented with both next to each other: / \ / \. The issue is, they're not characters used day-to-day so few people have made the association that the slash is the one going this way / and not the one going the other way \. They may not even be aware that both exist, and just pick the first slash-like symbol they see on their keyboards without looking further.