CS501 -- Fun Stuff
THE MIT LAW OF SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT ENVELOPMENT:
"Every program expands until it can read mail."
"The less you know about home computers, the more you'll want the new IBM PS/1."
-- A real IBM ad in the Edmonton Journal
"C++ also supports the notion of *friends*: co-operative classes that are permitted to see each other's private parts."
-- Grady Booch, "Object Oriented Design with Applications"
"Announced today was a new operating system for the PC. It is called `DOS/Perot'. When you boot it, it displays a message on the screen saying it's thinking of running. It then scans the hard drive, looking for competing OSs. If any competing OSs are found, it quits immediately."
-- Robert X. Cringely
one-banana problem /n./
At mainframe shops, where the computers have operators for routine administrivia, the programmers and hardware people tend to look down on the operators and claim that a trained monkey could do their job. It is frequently observed that the incentives that would be offered said monkeys can be used as a scale to describe the difficulty of a task. A one-banana problem is simple; hence, "It's only a one-banana job at the most; what's taking them so long?"
At IBM, folklore divides the world into one-, two-, and three-banana problems. Other cultures have different hierarchies and may divide them more finely; at ICL, for example, five grapes (a bunch) equals a banana. Their upper limit for the in-house sysapes is said to be two bananas and three grapes (another source claims it's three bananas and one grape, but observes "However, this is subject to local variations, cosmic rays and ISO"). At a complication level any higher than that, one asks the manufacturers to send someone around to check things.
-- from The New Hacker's Dictionary
Last modification: Mon Aug 25 18:42:12 EDT 1997
