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:
- saga n.
[WPI] A cuspy but bogus raving story about N
random broken people.
Here is a classic example of the saga form, as told... - 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... - Jacques: First, you must get to know your lane. Feel the slickness,
feel the slippery finish. Caresses it, experience it... - Real Programmer n.
[indirectly, from the book
"Real Men Don't Eat Quiche"] A particular sub-variety of
hacker:
one possessed of a flippant attitude toward complexity... - 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... - 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... - mumble interj.
1. Said when the correct response is too
complicated to enunciate,
or the speaker has not thought it out. Often prefaces... - bug n.
An unwanted and unintended property of a program or
piece of hardware,
esp. one that causes it to malfunction. Antonym... - One of the questions that comes up all the time is:
How enthusiastic is our support for UNIX? Unix was...
