The Mayans are Coming!
Posted by Uncle Bob on 04/17/2010
This one is just a quickie; too long for a tweet.
I gave a lightning keynote (actually a key-rant) today at #accu2010. It was about a bet between John Lakos and Kevlin Henney. Kevlin “won” the bet last night by showing that he could get a C++ program to behave in a way that John said couldn’t be done. My rant was about how both of them were wrong (not technically, but morally) and so they both owed me the sum of the bet. (I’m always happy to insert myself into any available revenue stream.)
The problem they had coded, and for which I presented a far superior solution in Clojure, was that old work-horse of prob/stat: “What’s the probability that out of N people in a room two will have the same birthday?”
Now, just to show you how strange James Bach is (and why his strangeness is in some bizarre way actually valuable); once my talk was done, James got up and said “What if some of the people in the room are ancient Mayans who use a completely different kind of calendar making it impossible to compare their birthdays?”
I’ve long said that testers were deviant souls with twisted minds that delight in reducing helpless software systems into piles of smoking slag. I believe James may be the exemplar.
Comments
Cazare Apartamente Bucuresti 6 months later:
Love the Mayan stuff. I’m a fan of Mayan history, and sure, the popular reading of it is all “wrong”, but I don’t think they were trying to get it “right”. It seems like “they” were just creating a myth to use to publicize a really dumb movie. As for the mommybloggers, I am a misfit as well, and just don’t get it, but I appreciate their good humored rebuttals. Men would have been meaner. Vive la difference! At least you know someone is paying attention.