NYCPHP Meetup

[Adam Maccabee Trachtenberg]

On Thu, 15 Jul 2004, John Lacey wrote:

> Once you get past the "emotional" part, it's a somewhat interesting
> piece.  I would be more interested in what the Convissors, Shifletts,
> Sklars, Tractenbergs and Zauneres and other people of that technical
> caliber on this list have to say...

In Issac Asimov's "Foundation," one of the chapters contains a scene
when a diplomat visits a planet. During his stay, the diplomat talks
the entire time. After he leaves one of the political figures
turns to his opponent and says something to the effect of: "See. I
told you he'd support our position."

As it turns out, the opponent had secretly taped everything the
diplomat said over the entire trip, and submitted it to the chair of
the university's linguistic department for lexical evaluation. The
evaluation was to filter out all the superfluous diplomatese and
conflicting statements, so the people on the planet could know exactly
what he said.

After a complete analysis, it turns out the diplomat said nothing at
all. Everything canceled out, and they were left with an empty piece
of paper.

I feel that way about the this piece. I spent 10 minutes reading it,
but afterwards, I don't feel he said anything meaningful.

I think if he had taken the time to edit the piece and shortened it
up, it would have been 25% the length and 25x more useful.

To quote Pascal:

   I am sorry for the length of my letter, but I had not the time to
   write a short one.

-adam

-- 
adam at trachtenberg.com
author of o'reilly's "upgrading to php 5" and "php cookbook"
avoid the holiday rush, buy your copies today!