⇥ Use your own brain, please
There has been a surprising—and, at times, outright hilarious—debate under the form of a number of reactions to my last post on self-commenting code (itself a follow-up to a blog post by Brandon Savage). For my part, I will limit myself to wonder, with a slightly curled lip, how, with so many people openly disdaining the mere idea of reducing the number of comments in code, there can be so much horribly commented code lying around, and leave things at that…
…well, not quite—I will say one more thing while I’m at it: please, please stop blindly quoting Martin Fowler and his books. He is not Jesus Christ, and his books are not the Bible. Like every other source of information, Mr. Fowler’s books should be assimilated into your own personal base of knowledge and used to formulate your own ideas, not parroted as if they were the word of the Almighty. I bet he would be the first to say so himself.
Let me give you a quick reason why quoting out of context is dangerous:
Never forget that the most sacred of all rights in this world is man’s right to the earth which he wishes to cultivate for himself and that the holiest of all sacrifices is that of the blood poured out for it.
What a heartfelt, patriotic and inspiring quote, eh? Too bad you may have a bit of trouble liking it once you find out who the author is.
Comments
// start with a greeting
Heretic!
// tell him whats wrong with his post
Don’t you dare to doubt the Fowler.
// conclude post with argument
The Fowler is holy.
The quote you give sounds humanitarian in the context of our own culture’s values.
I read about an ancient tribe in Africa who was lauded for their extreme peacefulness. They had an inviolable law that no member of the tribe may kill another human being. All their history showed a deep commitment to this law.
Then it turned out that people outside their immediate tribe did not fit their definition of “human being.” Their law of peace didn’t apply. In fact, they had no law against warring on neighboring tribes, and did so regularly with shocking disregard for human life.
History is full of examples like this.
I know I quoted Martin Fowler. But I’m overjoyed, since this proves that someone read all the way to the third paragraph of my blog post.
BTW, you have your theology wrong. Martin Fowler is not Jesus, I am. Fowler is God. Didn’t they teach you this in school?
Also: “use your own brain”? This is the Internet; I can use anyone’s brain I damn well please. Or are you going to sue me for brain piracy?
Invoking Godwin's Law => fail.
I trusted you dagfinn, and you betrayed every other one of the gods, for some straw monotheism++!!!!%four! (hungarian keyboard layout ftw)