Re: [PLUG] Why = history (was Re: ...PLUG Central - "OpenVPN" by Keith C. Perry (7pm at USP))

[Michael DePaulo <mikedep333@gmail.com>]

On 11/06/2015 03:09 PM, Soren Harward wrote:
> On Fri, Nov 6, 2015 at 12:33 PM, JP Vossen <jp@jpsdomain.org> wrote:
>> I've always wanted to know "why" partly because I'm just curious
>> and partly because it helps me understand and remember.  I find that is
>> especially true in the Unix/Linux world, which has such a neat history
>> and does have solid reasons for almost all of the stuff that looks odd
>> today.  (I suspect the same for medicine and law, but can't prove it.)
> 
> Speaking as someone who works in both those fields (biomedical
> patents), you're mostly on the right track, though the "neat" (as in
> "clean" or "tidy") and "solid reasons" (as in "well-founded" and
> "logical") are totally, fascinatingly wrong.  Laws make a lot more
> sense if you think of them as source code for how a
> country/state/organization/whatever is supposed to function.  So
> working in a legal field is like trying to work on a code base that
> was started 300+ years ago and is written in the irregular, ambiguous,
> and ever-changing natural language of English; where everyone uses
> their own in-house compiler; and where you have tens of thousands of
> project managers writing their own design documents and then trying to
> get them implemented by yelling at each other.  It's no wonder the
> whole thing is full of bugs, exploits, dead code, half-implemented
> features, and cruft nobody's looked at in over a century.

Very well said.

IANAL, but I have said that every US invention is based on the prior
work known as the "English language." Natural languages are inherent in
the design of every piece of software.
___________________________________________________________________________
Philadelphia Linux Users Group         --        http://www.phillylinux.org
Announcements - http://lists.phillylinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug-announce
General Discussion  --   http://lists.phillylinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug