As an aside-- do you think Accountants sit on forums and blogs all day and say "there are two kinds of Accountants in the world..." or is this something unique to software people?
do you think Accountants sit on forums and blogs all day and say "there are two kinds of Accountants in the world..." or is this something unique to software people?
I think almost every profession gets together and starts a conversation "There are two kinds of ___ in the world," however nearly all of the others are introducing a self-deprecating joke whereas programmers seem oblivious to the ridiculousness of trying to classify such complex activities, teams, and people on such simple lines with so few discriminants.
A programmer's primary job is the act of classification. Encoding a range of behaviors into functions/methods/objects in a way that we can keep track of and use over and over is what we do. So it's not too surprising that in our profession the notion of every idea having a "correct" box to fit into is so pervasive.
A good example of the ontology problem is the Venn diagram. Unspoken in every Venn diagram is the white space that stretches as far as the eye can see. That's the world that isn't categorized yet. Anything could lurk out there.
The more Venn circles you draw, the harder it is to introduce new territories that intersect with all the territories they need to. Along comes the purple Malaysian wolfhound with an eyepatch and the scheme falls apart.
And that's with true/false categories. What authority can decide what's music and what isn't?
I have spent my life trying unsuccessfully to classify things, so I sympathize. But I stop short of saying things can be classified so simply and on the basis of so few observables as to describe an entire methodology as having or lacking duct tape :-)
There are two kinds of people in the world: Those who bifurcate everything into two kinds, and those who don't.
As an aside-- do you think Accountants sit on forums and blogs all day and say "there are two kinds of Accountants in the world..." or is this something unique to software people?