Re: [PLUG] Interesting Article from eWeek

[Art Alexion <art.alexion@verizon.net>]

Paul L. Snyder wrote:

> Tobias DiPasquale wrote:
>
>
> "Better to be thought a fool than to open one's mouth and remove all 
> doubt."
>                                     - Samuel Clemens 


> Quoting Howard Bloom <lists@pc-man.com>:
>
>  
>
> > Save this one too:
> >
> > Never try to teach a pig to sing - it wastes your time and annoys
> > the pig.
> >
> > -- unknown - maybe I invented it.
> >    
>
> Then you must be SF grandmaster Robert Heinlein! ;)
>
>
>  


> Pansies or chrysanthemums, once you start wrestling in the
> garden the result is going to be a muddy mess.  This is a
> good thing if you prefer rolling in the mud to tending
> the garden, I suppose.
>  
I like that.

> While we're tossing quotes into the ring, here's one that I
> think apropos.  It's from Heinlein's _Time Enough For Love_,
> as is the above quotation:
>
>  Moving parts in rubbing contact require lubrication to
>  avoid excessive wear.  Honorifics and formal politeness
>  provide lubrication where people rub together.  Often the
>  very young, the untravelled, the naive, the unsophisticated
>  deplore these formalities as "empty", "meaningless", or
>  "dishonest", and scorn to use them.  No matter how "pure"
>  their motives, they thereby throw sand into machinery that
>  does not work too well at best.
>
>  
This is getting *so* off-topic...

Anyway, not to disparage Heinlein, but look at the simplicity of the 
Clemens quote vs. the Heinlein.  Incredible how much one can say about 
something in one sentence...

Now to get a bit back on topic, one of the things that kept me learning 
and using Linux is that elegant simplicity -- something it seems windows 
programmers abandoned.  (And now a plug: one of the Addison-Wesley books 
provided to us through Jeff Abrahamson is Eric S. Raymond's book, _The 
Art of Unix Programming_ [¨Zen and¨ is implied].  A valuable read even 
for us non-programmers.  In it he explains the elegance through 
simplicity ethic of Unix programs, and how complex problems should be 
solved with modularity rather that monstrously large programs -- prone 
to problems, and consisting of often useless functionality that, at 
best, devours performance.  This big spaghetti program seems to be the 
windows way.  When hardware gets more powerful, windows users never get 
to enjoy better performance, because their software demands increase to 
keep up with it.)

--

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Art Alexion
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