(This is a snapshot of my old weblog. New posts and selected republished essays can be found at raganwald.com.)
Tuesday, April 03, 2007
We haven't heard it all before
I used to travel the commuter train in Ontario. They work on an honour system: if you don’t purchase and punch a ticket (or purchase a monthly pass), you get a $90 ticket if a transit police officer spot checks you.
One of these officers told me that he had a standing policy of overlooking anyone who told him a new story. But he really had “heard it all.”
When, I asked, was the last time he heard a new one? It seems a few months previously a woman had said—with a straight face—that she had just polished her nails and couldn’t get her ticket out of her purse to punch it.
He laughed and let her go, nobody had dared to say anything so narcissistic before.
Perhaps that is the new FizzBuzz rule: by all means let yourself go, but if we’ve seen substantially the same thing before… prepare for flames.
Solving FizzBuzz using compiler error messages
I used to travel the commuter train in Ontario. They work on an honour system: if you don’t purchase and punch a ticket (or purchase a monthly pass), you get a $90 ticket if a transit police officer spot checks you.
One of these officers told me that he had a standing policy of overlooking anyone who told him a new story. But he really had “heard it all.”
When, I asked, was the last time he heard a new one? It seems a few months previously a woman had said—with a straight face—that she had just polished her nails and couldn’t get her ticket out of her purse to punch it.
He laughed and let her go, nobody had dared to say anything so narcissistic before.
Perhaps that is the new FizzBuzz rule: by all means let yourself go, but if we’ve seen substantially the same thing before… prepare for flames.
Solving FizzBuzz using compiler error messages
