--- Eivind Eklund <eeklund / gmail.com> wrote:

> On Fri, 15 Oct 2004 02:13:35 +0900, Markus <markus / reality.com>
> wrote:
> >      Why the rabid objection to people putting broccoli on their
> > sandwiches if they like it?
> 
> Because people are putting sandwitches everywhere, and a lot of us
> are
> forced to eat other people's for a variety of reasons.

I don't know about you, but I always check to see what's in my sandwich
before I eat it, especially if some stranger offers it to me out of the
blue, saying "Eat this. I made it special." Once I get a better idea of
what sort of sandwiches a person makes, I might relax a little bit.
It's also likely that this budding preparer of sandwiches will realize
that not everybody likes pickled peppered broccoli on their peanut
butter and jelly sandwiches, and not share the more exotic creations. 

If I'm desperately hungry, and there's a sandwich with creamed crab in
peppered peanut sauce, I'll just take that creamed crab off and eat the
part that doesn't make me gag. I will definitely warn all of my friends
that this freak is making sandwiches with peanut butter and antifreeze
simply because he can. My friends will probably avoid the freakish
fabricator of crazed comestibles, leaving him to eat his razor blade
and mouse poop sandwiches by himself.

I like the sandwich analogy. I may have taken the idea into a new and
more nauseating direction, but the analogy works. Code which abuses the
flexibility of the language will not spread very far, simply because
people won't use it. That has been my experience so far over the last
few years, and I don't expect that pattern to change any time soon. If
you see code which has had such abuse inflicted on it, you need to
either fix it or avoid it. You're certainly not forced to eat it.

Kind Regards,

Brian Wisti
http://coolnamehere.com/