DRM - Daniel’s Random Mutterings

Things that make you go “hmmm….”. Or, in some cases, simply ‘WTF?????‘ According to http://www.turbogears.com/, the Python programming language is “agile, mature, cross-platform, well-documented, easy and fun”.

Agile? Python is an ‘agile’ programming language?? Why’s that then? And, more importantly, what’s that? Are we trying to get as many buzzwords into our Web page as we can manage?

This reminds me of one of my favourite Limericks:

There was a young man from Japan
Whose Limericks never would scan
When asked WHY this was so,
He said ‘Yes, I know.
But it’s because I always try to get as many words into the last line as I possibly can.’

I always thought beginning a sentence with the word “but” was bad style.

But here’s Bruce Eckel, beginning a whole article with “but”. In so doing, he kicks off an interesting blog post about Java, Ruby, Python and the future (or lack thereof) of these development environments.

Makes for some nice toilet reading. But more on that later. (No pun intented)

OK, OK. After ranting about the stupid “random” button on my Creative Player, I actually discovered the “lock player” switch, which disables all button input and perfectly solves my vacuuming problem. I admit I should perhaps have researched a little more thoroughly before ranting about stupid designers and so on.

The thing is, though - I have what I think is a legitimate excuse for this stupidity. The “lock player” lever has a little lock icon next to it. It’s not that I hadn’t seen the button. I had just assumed that it was a write-protect switch, preventing me from overwriting or erasing files on my player. You know? Like on USB sticks. In my mind, I had drawn an analogy between the USB sticks which I hook up to my PC’s USB port to put stuff onto them and the Creative MP3 player, which I hook up to my USB port in order to put stuff onto it. The USB sticks have a shiftable button thingy with a lock icon which write-protects the USB stick. Now the new player comes along and has a slidy button thingy with a lock icon next to it. Logically (cough), I assumed this shifty button thingy was for write-protecting the player, preventing me from accidentally wiping out 20 GB of MP3s I payed for.

So, I guess this just goes to show, again, that different people develop different mental models of things and when faced with a new issue tend to apply — with as little adaptation as possible — models they’ve previously developed to the new problem.