a classic example of UI fuckery

[eub]

When you record a macro in Word, it wants a name for the macro. It presents a text-entry field, and lets you type free-form text, and fiddle with whatever other settings you like in the dialog. When you're all done, that's when it pops up

The user isn't even told which element of the dialog was unacceptable, much less what the rules are for Visual Basic procedures, and God forbid Word should validate macro names as you type for legality as Visual Basic procedures or better yet translate arbitrary names to legal Visual Basic procedures. And you know what occurs to me?

I never asked to think about Visual Basic.

(Why was I recording a macro in Word? I hadn't reprinted my back-pocket book list since I left CMU and my perl | more perl | enscript | laser printer lash-up; was trying to familiarize myself with native tools rather than just snarfing win32 enscript and ghostscript. Silly.)