Where's my dictionary?

Robin — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 12:52:00 GMT

I saw this sentence today on ArsTechnica:

"...Autotools, an intractably arcane and grotesquely anachronistic cesspool of ineffable complexity that makes even seasoned programmers nauseous."

I think that sentence could win an award if there was a most-big-words-used-where-small-words-would-do-fine contest. Good thing that my dictionary is only a Spotlight search away... [type][type][type]... Ah so that's what it means. Yes, I agree. 😉

Po-tay-toe, Po-tah-toe

Robin — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 19:35:00 GMT

Last week on wxPython-users a user wrote about a particular GUI class and said that, "it looks really awful." Trying to get more details from the person about what is so bad about it only resulted in some confusion because he seems to really like the class and listed some nice features when asked, "in what way is it awful?" Well, as you can probably guess, it turns out that English is not his native language and he intended to say that the GUI class in question filled him with awe, or in other words, that it is "really awesome."

This got me to thinking about something that has probably crossed every computer scientist's mind at one time or another: It's too bad that our spoken and written word can't be passed through something like a syntax check, preprocessor, lint, or a compiler. Just think how many problems could be caught before the communications arrived at the listener's auditory or visual interface! If we could communicate person to person using something that is as clean and as structured as a programming language like Python then I think that there would be a lot less confusion in the world. If our spoken word would fail to compile if it is incorrectly spoken, and if it failed to run if the assumptions it was built upon were incorrect, or were not fully specified then when what is spoken does successfully execute then there would be a much higher level of comprehension at the receiving end, and a high level of trust that what was received was exactly what was intended to be said. Using a structured communication mechanism like a programming language would also allow for clear and unambiguous responses or acknowledgments that what was said was received by the listener, and understood.

There would still be bugs of course, since nobody is perfect. But I expect that if you look at the number of times that what you speak or write is misunderstood or misinterpreted, or even just ignored, and compare that to the number of bugs in your software that have made it out to the customers, then I think that for almost all of us there would be a huge difference in those numbers. So what do you think, can Python 4000 be a spoken language?

As seen in wxPython-users...

Robin — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 16:38:00 GMT

I got a good chuckle out of this quote:

"I understand that you want this. I am advising you against wanting it." -- Chris Mellon

wxPython (Posts about Quotes)

Where's my dictionary?

Po-tay-toe, Po-tah-toe

As seen in wxPython-users...