On Wed, 13 Mar 1996, The Chazman wrote:
> A concept I picked up at HNC over the summer might do equally well : the
> "stupid tax". You just levy a tax on stupidity, with the magnitude of fine
> proportional to just how stupid the action was. People already pay it on
> some occassions; if you're stupid enough to tilt a coke machine to try to
> get change or a free soda out of it to the point where it tips over, your
> stupid tax is getting crushed under it when it falls on you.
I guess you saw the Darwin Awards? It's scarily applicable because
yesterday I bought a bag of Cheetos from the UAPE basement machine, and
the damn bag stuck on those stupid curlie-device things they use to
portion out prizes. It seemed like it was hanging on a thread, so I
banged the thing a couple times, and no dice, so I had to resort to
trying to rock it a little.
Those things weigh a *TON*. Or, I have gotten so weak as a CS major that
I have no perspective. The best I was able to achieve was an inch move
along the floor by slamming my body against it. Finally the bag dropped,
but I kept expecting someone to spot me, and it's impossible not to look
guilty when it appears you are attempting to steal junk food.
As long as we're on the subject of stupidity and snack machines, I have
to mention that someone who will remain nameless (though I'm pretty sure
he's on this list) wanted to buy some junk food, but only had a five. I
didn't have change, so I tried to just give him a dollar, but he refused
to take it. I told him he could pay me back if he wanted, but he still
refused. SO, he tries to go buy something with the five -- it took the
bill and gave him no credit! I told him it was karma. And he still
wouldn't take the dollar.
> Paul might
> argue that if you're stupid enough to write any given program in any
> language other than Perl, your stupid tax is all the extra time you wasted
> when (and I quote) "[he] could do it in five lines of Perl", not to mention
> the sound laughing-in-the-face he'll give you for it.
I like to think of that laughing-in-the-face as a public service. It
often eventually breaks through peoples' prejudices and they discover the
wonder, and are eternally grateful. Sometimes of course it just pisses
them off. Heehee.
BTW, I don't advocate Perl for ALL tasks, just 99% of them. For example
all of our 133 projects have been terribly unsuited for Perl, it was just
neat to do it that way.
The stupid tax does apply to ALL people insufficiently lazy to explore
all available tools. That's lazy in the sense that Larry Wall uses it,
e.g. he wrote Perl because he was too lazy to write what he needed with
the available tools.
(For those of you that don't know, LAW says that the three cardinal
virtues of a programmer are laziness, impatience and hubris. I leave it
as an exercise to the reader to figure out exactly why.)
-PSP
