Hi --

On Sat, 8 Oct 2005, Martin DeMello wrote:

> Devin Mullins <twifkak / comcast.net> wrote:
>>
>> Nonetheless, I don't care about select!. Someone made a comment, err,
>> somewhere, about how all the stupid shit gets bantered to death simply
>> because more people understand it. It might have been Jason Hunter (of
>> JDOM fame). Not sure. It was funny, though.
>
> You're probably thinking about this:
>
> http://www.unixguide.net/freebsd/faq/16.19.shtml

(I'd want to give Professor Parkinson the benefit of the doubt and
assume that his book actually isn't as trite as that paraphrase
suggests.  But I don't know.  The "Someone's Law" formula certainly
operates often as a magic ticket to longevity :-)

Anyway.... at the risk of getting meta-meta-meta, I'd like to suggest
that discussing details of things like method names (in this case,
including Matz indicating that he was interested in what people think)
is actually not "stupid".  We're just lucky that Matz pays attention
to details like this, over and over again year after year.  It's that,
and not a deterministic, mechanistic "Well, X does this, so Y has to
do it" logic, that makes Ruby so beautiful.


David

-- 
David A. Black
dblack / wobblini.net