Comments on: trivial

By: geo

geo — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 04:44:31 +0000

noadays with so many people taken out patent on trivial things just becuase they weren’t documented – document EVERYTHING on the web – preferably in a dated way – so prior art can be proved and people can stop getting patents for using software to do …exactly what it was designed to do.

By: maht

maht — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 23:10:10 +0000

use the source, l00k

facetiousness aside, I think part of the problem is that for the old hands we still remember when we learned how to program using punched cards and spanners and then later soldering irons became the deluxe model. When 1Mb of memory was a dream and documentation was a datasheet. The things you describe: shell scripts and CGI are such huge constructs built upon the basic building blocks of computing. Once you have those in your head everything else does look trivial, it’s just a bunch of commands in a domain specific language be it some HTTP headers or some PostScript.

Learning top down is harder than bottom up.

By: Michael Alan Miller » And, obviously…..

Michael Alan Miller » And, obviously….. — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 22:14:36 +0000

[...] by Chill on 28 Jan 2008 at 03:13 pm | Tagged as: Uncategorized This reminds me of being in a class where the professor says something like, “And, [...]

By: Peteris Krumins

Peteris Krumins — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 20:08:07 +0000

I disagree.

My theory has always been: Everything is trivial!

By: Ben

Ben — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 18:38:44 +0000

Chip and Dan Heath talk a bit about this problem in their book Made to Stick – they call it the “curse of knowledge.” The solution (as much as there can be one) is empathy; all of us need to be able to adopt a more naive perspective when communicating ideas, since without it that whole middle ground between overwhelming and trivial is much harder to get through.

By: bshock

bshock — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 17:31:22 +0000

I have to agree with at least the spirit of this article. Experience has shown me again and again that even the information that seems trivial to me now may be nearly impenetrable in as soon as six months (or less).

I keep a personal work journal of every feature I write or fix, every IDE or application I use, every little trick or technique I think might possibly be useful someday. This journal saves my butt at least once a week. This isn’t what the author is advocating, and it’s probably not practical for most of the post-literate generation (all of you ambulatory zygotes born after 1979, the year I started college). But I think it supports the point that no technical information is trivial.

By: mphair

mphair — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

the phrase “automatic documentation inheritance” comes to my mind, and it is as vague there as it here. i get flashes of google and wikipedia autolinking on individual words. there are firefox plugins that will allow you to easily define a word. Now if we could only find a way to automatically search for a vague concept.