Life Much Better Thanks To Recent Elections WASHINGTON, DC--Life in the U.S. has significantly improved as a result of the Nov. 3 elections, according to a Georgetown University report released Tuesday. "The elections have brought about a great deal of positive change," the report read. "Healthcare is universal, the environment is cleaner and streets are safer. These new politicians are the ones we needed." (_The Onion_, 18 November 1998) %% Q: Are you frequently recognized? A: Yeah, but people often think I'm a clone. (Siouxsie Sioux, in _Details_, 199109) %% For best results, avoid doing stupid things. -- Cliff Stoll, http://www.kleinbottle.com/specs_for_nice_klein_bottl.htm %% Write once, blood everywhere. -- ignatz@parkview.snni.com, on Java %% * gnat decides he hates businesses. especially businesses who offer their nobody speakers as "an exceptional Management Team who are also impressive speakers" * gnat wishes TPC was more like YAPC, so he could write back saying, "fuck you and your exceptional management team. Call me after you file Chapter 11." -- Nat Torkington %% In his letter to the Corinthians, Paul instructed send ten copies to the Thessalonians and the Ephesians. But the Ephesians broke the chain, and were punished by the LORD ... -Joe Bay %% Quick, panic before it's too late! -Dominus (IRC 20010403) %% Oh no! Now I have an image of Richard Nixon *and* Ronald Reagan having sex in the Oval Office. RN: "Ronnie, get down there and win one for my zipper." RR: "Well, I see why they call you Tricky Dick." -Ed Dravecky III, rasseff %% Finally, although the subject is not a pleasant one, I must mention PL/I, a programming language for which the defining documentation is of a frightening size and complexity. Using PL/I must be like flying a plane with 7,000 buttons, switches, and handles to manipulate in the cockpit. I absolutely fail to see how we can keep our growing programs firmly within our intellectual grip when by its sheer baroqueness the programming language---our basic tool, mind you!---already escapes our intellectual control. And if I have to describe the influence PL/I can have on its users, the closest metaphor that comes to my mind is that of a drug. I remember from a symposium on higher level programming languages a lecture given in defense of PL/I by a man who described himself as one of its devoted users. But within a one-hour lecture in praise of PL/I, he managed to ask for the addition of about 50 new "features," little supposing that the main source of his problems could very well be that it contained already far too many "features." The speaker displayed all the depressing symptoms of addiction, reduced as he was to the mental stagnation in which he could only ask for more, more, more.... When FORTRAN has been call an infantile disorder, full PL/I, with its growth characteristics of a dangerous tumor, could turn out to be a fatal disease. -- _The Humble Programmer_, E. Dijkstra %% The competent programmer is fully aware of the strictly limited size of his own skull; therefore he approaches the programming task in full humility, and among other things he avoids clever tricks like the plague. In the case of a well-known conversational programming language I have been told from various sides that as soon as a programming community is equipped with a terminal for it, a specific phenomenon occurs that even has a well-established name: it is called "the one-liners." It takes one of two different forms: one programmer places a one-line program on the desk of another and either he proudly tells what it does and adds the question, "Can you code this in less symbols?"---as if this were of any conceptual relevance!---or he just says, "Guess what it does!" From this observation we must conclude that this language as a tool is an open invitation for clever tricks; and while exactly this may be the explanation for some of its appeal, viz., to those who like to show how clever they are, I am sorry, but I must regard this as one of the most damning things that can be said about a programming language. -- _The Humble Programmer_, E. Dijkstra %% My cat's estimation of things probably involves himself, the catnip sock, the warm spot near the clothes dryer, the food bowl, and then me, the Monkey Butler. -- Sean Burke %% Did I mention the most recent development on my HS alumn mailing list? no Well, all week I've been plagued by these chirpy messages from people who say things like "Then after I sold my company for $118 million, I went to work in the UNESCO office of policy development. I also write op-ed pieces for the Wall Street Journal in my spare time, la la!" all must die But today there's a message from someone in a one-woman performance art show about S&M in San Francisco. And she seems a little diffident about it, like she's afraid we'll be shocked, but all I can feel is relief that at least SOMEONE in my class turned out fucking NORMAL. %% Presence++ o/~ Nobody's fault but mi-i-ine o/~ Zeppelin stole a lot. Who'd they steal that from? Some old blind black guy, most likely. ... (20 minutes later) http://members.tripod.com/~blueslyrics/artistswithsongs/blind_willie_johnson_1.htm#it_s_nobody_s_fault_but_mine yrlnry++ blind_willie_johnson ology: Actually I was kidding. I really had no idea there actually was a blind black guy. You totally called it, MJD. :) Well, sometimes I'm an uncannily good guesser, but I don't think I can take too much credit for this time. %% (A monologue on IRC at approximately 4AM) hm, Perl running as about the only active process on my year-old MSWin-running desktop machine seems faster than the box at CMU which, admittedly, is occupied with other tasks. excellent! question is whether I can set this a-runnin' for 10,000 generations, go to bed, and not worry that it'll leak memory until there's no more to eat. That's what Goofus would do. Gallant would make it dump its state every 1,000 generations, and restart the process with the new state. Then he could run it every night for days. since the whole genome pool can fit in about 8K. the Goofus in me wants to just huff glue and watch Springer, tho. * TorgoX sets the infinite monkeys working for a few hours, and shuffles off to sleeeeeep. <-- TorgoX has quit (Leaving) %% If you read a lot of Dave Barry, you'll discover that one of the easiest ways to be funny is to be specific when it's not called for. "Scrappy pugs" are funnier than "dogs." "Miss Piggy" is funnier than "the user". Instead of saying "special interests," say "left-handed avocado farmers." Instead of saying "People who refuse to clean up after their dogs should be punished," say that they should be "sent to prisons so lonely that the inmates have to pay spiders for sex." -- Joel Spolsky, http://joelonsoftware.com/stories/storyReader$222 %% As to the technical subject matter: I have been a student, and would-be enabler, of internationalization technology for about 20 years now. In that time, I have met experts on elephant's trunks, on elephant's front feet, on elephant's bellies, on elephant's butts, and indeed on elephant's droppings. From rhinologists to scatologists, all share the comfortable belief that people outside their specialty will know instinctively how to make use of their little perspective on the entire, very large, animal. I'm persomally more comfortable with that brand of parochialism than I am with the smaller group who see two or three neighboring parts and consider themselves world-class elephantologists. (My personal goal in all this is to understand the beast well enough to make a good saddle for him, so that my customers may ride him to where they want to go.) -- P.J. Plauger, <3ba5efda$0$29744$4c41069e@reader1.ash.ops.us.uu.net> %% There's a name for people who are so stupid they think everyone else is stupid instead. -- P.J. Plauger, <3ba5efda$0$29744$4c41069e@reader1.ash.ops.us.uu.net> %% A good bug report contains a destilled example. A bad bug report contains a million lines of rotten code with a single line "this code is perfect, but your compiler does not conform to my wishes". -- Erik Naggum, <3213617417316421@naggum.net> %% But can anarcho-capitalism make it rain donuts? That is, as always, the real test. -- James S. Battista, <9ue82n$jh8$1@hermes.acs.unt.edu> %% Technically I'm pescetarian since I still eat fish. I thought the pescetarians split off from the calvinists in the schism of 1624. Some disagreement about whether the transfiguration of Christ was anomalous or merely eutherious. -- irc.infobot.org #perl, 20011206T1513 %% My theory is that people whose parents had litters of 20-30 kids, don't care about distractions. Whereas I was the only child, so no I do NOT have a brain that can listen to your cellphone ring while you're yelling into the cordless, while I'm getting emails in Pidgin English from the self-appointed 'project manager' that say "halo shan can u tek a look it this thx" -- Sean Burke irc.infobot.org #tempura, 20020108T085 %% When was 'O Canada' introduced? Must have been pretty recently---maybe in the 1960's? "A Canada" through "N Canada" were failures. Then MacKenzie MacKenzie, a defrocked Mountie from Lard Heights, Alberta, had a flash of inspiration one day while drinking maple syrup. The rest is history. -- Conrad Heiney irc.infobot.org #tempura, 20020109T1846 %% "Luigi, we're doing an article on next-generation garage door openers. Call Eco for a quote. Something zippy, but not too 'up'" "The garage door opener pulls aside the covering of our humble abodes to reveal an Ali Baba's den of disused machinery and forgotten woodworking projects. Like a genie, it transports us to our unknown past." "Thanks ummy!" -- Sean Burke and Conrad Heiney irc.infobot.org #tempura, 20020110T0237 %% Bernstein also indicated how to extend his results to division by any finite n, but we are not aware of anyone other than Bernstein himself who ever claimed to understand this argument. -- John Conway and Peter Doyle "Division by three" http://math.dartmouth.edu/~doyle/docs/three/three/three.html %% The quill pens at your argument table are gifts to you a souvenir of your having argued before the highest Court in the land. Take them with you. They are handcrafted and usable as writing quills. -- Guide for Counsel in Cases to be Argued before the Supreme Court of the United States %% "Mr. President, it constantly amazes me that you always seem to know what is the right thing to do." "Oh, I don't think knowing what's the right thing to do ever gives anybody too much trouble. It's _doing_ the right thing that seems to give a lot of people trouble." -- Harry S Truman %% I have to say that I find [Richard M. Stallman], once again, pretty inspiring. He challenges us all to think about what we do in moral terms. This is such a rare thing to do that people often don't even understand what he's talking about. But think about it -- he says: Decide what to do based on what you think is right or wrong. Here is the decision that I have made. Here is why I have made it. Who else talks that way? Not -- "Here is a way that will benefit you the most..." or "Here is a thing to do which will protect you from something you fear" or "Here is a way to get back at someone you resent." But instead: "Decide what you think is the right way". I find that pretty exhilirating. -- Dan Milstein %% Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it. -- Brian W. Kernighan %% Basically, avoid comments. If your code needs a comment to be understood, it would be better to rewrite it so it's easier to understand. -- Rob Pike %% retardo, otoh, how does this square with Perl's code-is-art stance? brev: Perl has a code-is-art stance? That's news to me. well, there's a notion in perl that code is a means of self-expression, at least I thought so. OK, try this analogy. Code is like the steel in the bridge. The steel isn't important, even though the bridge is made of steel. If you could build the bridge without steel, you would. The art is in the bridge, the way the steel is used, the way the design uses the least possible amount of steel, not in the steel itself. %% Much of what I write was suggested by Paul Gray, and in all cases, he has always edited and improved my writings before they are published. In return, I never mention his name unless somebody points out an error in one of my publications, in which case I always say, "Paul Gray told me that." -- Robert E. Machol, "Lerner's Law". OR/MS Today, 1998 %% "... Suppose we found a faster way to compute square roots or that we found that we really wanted the cube root instead. Without the use of a subroutine, we would have to go through our entire program, modifying it everywhere the square root calculation took place. There is no better way to put new bugs into a program. Had we written a square root subroutine, we would have to change only one program, and at least all the new bugs would be in one spot." -- Walter G. Rudd, "Assembly Language Programming and the IBM 360 and 370 Computers" %% ["Cranberry morpheme"] is standardly used by linguists to describe an unproductive bound morpheme whose meaning is impossible to pin down because it occurs in only one word. The term comes, of course, from the morpheme 'cran' in the word 'cranberry', which used to be an excellent example of this until the Ocean Spray people got to work on it. (We know that 'berry' is a morpheme, so 'cran' must be one, too, but what does cran mean? 'Round and red'? 'Grown in bogs'? 'Containing pectin'?) Now that you can buy cranapple and crangrape and cranraspberry and crangodknowswhatelse juice (in which cran is used quite productively to mean 'cranberry'), the phrase "cranberry morpheme" is a little misleading. I hereby propose that we start calling these things huckleberry morphemes instead, at least until the juice industry starts squeezing out huckleguava or something and compels us to revise our terminology again. %% A monograph is, inevitably, a rather personal thing and the account is bound to be skewed by too much print squandered on things that interest the author, and too little on the things that may interest others. I am sorry about this. But not very. -- M.J. Wells, _Octopus_ %% it's easy to make scrapple. You just throw a grenade in a barnyard and fry up the result with cornmeal %% Does Scheme have macros? I think so. I guess that means you can write your own (broken) defun to make up for Scheme's lack of one. But Scheme lacks *everything*, which is the point of it. It's the NachOS of programming languages. It's the Pascal of programming languages. %% Hah, all we poets write a great deal about love: but none of us may grasp the word's full meaning until he reflects that this is a passion mighty enough to induce a woman to put up with him. -- James Branch Cabell, _Jurgen_ There's no one programmer who does the work of ten other programmers. One uber-programmer does just as much work as one ordinary programmer. It's just that the results solve ten times as many problems. Programming is fundamentally a design problem. A great bridge designer doesn't do the work of ten lousy bridge designers; the great one designs one great bridge in the time it takes the ten lousy ones to design ten lousy bridges. The best approximation is that each problem has a certain complexity and a certain size. The size determines how long it will take, and it doesn't matter how good the developers are. The complexity determines how good a developer is needed to make progress at all. If you've got only easy problems, an uber-programmer doesn't help you much (unless the programmer can find a smaller, harder problem that replaces the big easy one). If you've got a hard problem, ten average programmers will work on it forever without getting any results. And there's one last thing specific to computers: the computer can solve easy problems for you, but making it do so is a hard problem. But solving that one hard problem (plus some processor time) resolves a lot of easy problems. Another type of hard problem is writing a magic library function that makes a range of moderately hard problems easy enough for average programmers to solve. If you've got ten people essentially doing data entry, an uber-programmer may be able to eliminate the need for them to do that at all. If you've got ten developers working on some problem, an uber-programmer may be able to double their productivity. In either of these cases, the uber-programmer directly produces something that isn't part of the actual project, but the benefit to the project is on the order of ten average programmers' work. And, if the uber-programmer reduces the complexity of the problem to put it in reach of the rest of the team, no amount of ordinary programmers' work would benefit the project as much as the uber-programmer's contribution. Of course, if you require an uber-programmer to literally do the work of average programmers, there's no benefit at all. Daniel Barkalow %%%