alt Hacker NewsI 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.
Replies
Twey • 08/10/2025
I wonder if it's dyslexia-adjacent. Dyslexic people famously have particular difficulty distinguishing rotated and reflected letterforms.
➕ show 1 reply
I 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.