Whenever somebody gives you a spec for some new technology, if you can't
understand the spec, don't worry too much. Nobody else is going to
understand it, either, and it's probably not going to be important. This is
the lesson of SGML, which hardly anyone used, until Tim Berners-Lee dumbed
it down dramatically and suddenly people understood it. For the same reason
he simplified the file transfer protocol, creating HTTP to replace FTP.
You can see this phenomenon all over the place; even within a given
technology some things are easy enough to figure out and people use them
(like COM's IUnknown), while others are so morbidly complicated (IMonikers)
when they should be simple (what's wrong with URLs?) that they languish.
Joel Spolsky
Diary entry for April 2, 2002
understand the spec, don't worry too much. Nobody else is going to
understand it, either, and it's probably not going to be important. This is
the lesson of SGML, which hardly anyone used, until Tim Berners-Lee dumbed
it down dramatically and suddenly people understood it. For the same reason
he simplified the file transfer protocol, creating HTTP to replace FTP.
You can see this phenomenon all over the place; even within a given
technology some things are easy enough to figure out and people use them
(like COM's IUnknown), while others are so morbidly complicated (IMonikers)
when they should be simple (what's wrong with URLs?) that they languish.
Joel Spolsky
Diary entry for April 2, 2002
Related:
- aga n.
[WPI] A cuspy but bogus raving story about N
random broken people.
Here is a classic example of the saga form, as told by Guy L.... - The beach was a beach we shall not name, because his private house
was there
but it was a small sandy stretch somewhere along the hundreds of miles of coastline that runs west from Los Angeles, which is described in the new edition of "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" in one entry as "junky, wunky, lunky, stunky, and what's that other word, and all kinds of bad stuff, woo," and in another, written only hours later as "being like several thousand square miles of American Express junk mail, but without the same sense of moral depth.... - Jacques: First, you must get to know your lane. Feel the slickness,
feel the slippery finish.
Caresses it, experience it. Quite smooth, isn't it?... - Real Programmer n.
[indirectly, from the book
"Real Men Don't Eat Quiche"] A particular sub-variety of
hacke
one possessed of a flippant attitude toward complexity that is arrogant even when justified by experience.... - Brief History Of Linux (#24)
Linus Torvalds quotes from his interview in "LinuxNews" (October 1992)
"I doubt Linux will be here to stay, and maybe Hurd is the wave of the future (and maybe not).... - casting the runes n.
What a guru does when you ask him
or her to run a particular program and type at it because it never
works for anyone else
esp. used when nobody can ever see what the guru is doing different from what J.... - mumble interj.
1. Said when the correct response is too
complicated to enunciate, or the speaker has not thought it out.
Often prefaces a longer answer, or indicates a general reluctance to get into a long discussion.... - bug n.
An unwanted and unintended property of a program or
piece of hardware, esp.
one that causes it to malfunction. Antonym of feature.... - One of the questions that comes up all the time i
How enthusiastic is our support for UNIX? Unix was written on our machines and for our machines many years ago....
