Chris Devers asked, > There's a canned retort in here about those who fail to learn from > rsync will end up reinventing it, badly, but I can't quite find the > witty version I'm looking for (and, for that matter, I can't quite > remember the quote that I'm ripping off there, either...).
to which Chris Ball replied, > I'm quite partial to: > "Those who do not learn from Dilbert are doomed to repeat it." That's very nice, I like the direct allusion to Santayana, [ "Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it." [ George Santayana [ http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/g/georgesant101521.html which is often quoted as "learn from history" and/or "Doomed", but "Condemned" appears to be the academically accepted version. If you wish to learn from Dilbert, but can't avoid the PHBs, *the* book on the care and feeding of PHBs is "_Throwing_the_Elephant_: Zen and the Art of Managing Up", Stanley Bing, http://isbn.nu/0060934220 [Also author of _What would Machiavelli Do?_] Chris Devers was however obviously looking for this rather specific elaboration of Santayana's, as it captures the inevitableness. [ "Any sufficiently complicated c or fortran program contains an ad hoc informally- [ specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Common Lisp." [ -Greenspun's 10th law of programming [ http://philip.greenspun.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=000tgU Note - there are no laws (1..9). MJD's recent HOP book is a tour-de-force demonstration that even the Perl interpreter has a inner-Lisp struggling to get out. http://hop.perl.plover.com/ (I once *intentionally* added a slow, partial Common Lisp to a C++ program ... we added the C-implemented Scheme in One Defun to it as a macro language, and I added a bit of CLOS/CL OOP to it.) _ Bill most definitely NOT speaking for the firm _______________________________________________ Boston-pm mailing list [email protected] http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
