Don’t let your children grow up to become syntax geeks…
Archive for June, 2005
![Discussion during a WordPress IRC Meetup veers to whether a Mediawiki-like linking syntax would be useful. Everyone chimes in with an opinion, with multiple instances of '[[]]++'](http://firasd.org/weblog/2005/06/syntax-geeks.png)
Terry Bisson’s ‘They’re Made Out of Meat‘ was a 1991 Nebula Awards nominee. It’s a wonderful short piece, all dialogue.
“They’re made out of meat.”
“Meat?”
“Meat. They’re made out of meat.”
“Meat?”
“There’s no doubt about it. We picked up several from different parts of the planet, took them aboard our recon vessels, and probed them all the way through. They’re completely meat.”
“That’s impossible. What about the radio signals? The messages to the stars?”
“They use the radio waves to talk, but the signals don’t come from them. The signals come from machines.”
“So who made the machines? That’s who we want to contact.”
“They made the machines. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. Meat made the machines.”
“That’s ridiculous. How can meat make a machine? You’re asking me to believe in sentient meat.”
Veteran Microsoft hacker Raymond Chen is chafed because of all the attention surrounding Google Maps:
Let’s see, Google Maps adds the world outside the United States, Canada and the UK, and people go ga-ga. Nevermind that Google’s new “maps” have nothing beyond country boundaries. “Aww, look at Google, she’s so cute and adorable!”
I’m sure the people at the existing online map services like MapQuest and MSN MapPoint are sitting there like older siblings, wondering when exactly they turned into chopped liver. MSN MapPoint has actual maps of most of Europe, and MapQuest’s library of maps is larger still. (Kathmandu anyone?)
I’m surprised that a person of Raymond’s calibre would miss the whole point. For a user, the interface is the software. It’s hard to argue that any of the interfaces Raymond pointed to are better than Google’s endlessly draggable, window-wide maps and unbounded input boxes. Perhaps the other software has clever datastructures, awesome algorithms, lots of information sitting there in the database. Who cares? I guarantee that your satisfaction level with a tool will be far more affected by whether it behaved well than by its other, more subtle capabilities.
Tellingly, Raymond’s next post harps on the fact that the Date/Time control panel is not a calendar.
Unaware of its design, people have been using the Date/Time control panel as if it were a calendar, not realizing that it was doing all sorts of scary things behind the scenes. It’s like using a cash register as an adding machine. Sure, it does a great job of adding numbers together, but you’re also messing up the accounting back at the main office!
Way to miss the point. I need to check a calendar far more often than I need to adjust my system clock.
