[SLL] faking Unix knowledge? pretend to know open source Unix?

[Kurt Buff]

On Thu, Jan 15, 2009 at 1:54 PM, Chuck Wolber <chuckw at quantumlinux.com> wrote:
> On Thu, 15 Jan 2009, Jesse Keating wrote:
>
>> On Thu, 2009-01-15 at 10:37 -0800, Dave Dennis wrote:
>> > More like Write Once and shove your problem off on the operations
>> > team.
>>
>> I think that accurately describes the situation.
>
> No. This is a common logical falacy. Just because something was done
> badly, it does not mean you throw out the baby with the bathwater.
>
> You have to prove that WORA in and of itself is a bad idea. It is not
> reasonable to assume that since you have seen it done badly 100% of the
> time that the idea of WORA is then a bad idea unless you can say that the
> reason it was done badly 100% of the time is because WORA itself is
> flawed. To do that, you have to articulate why WORA itself is flawed in
> the absence of developer's ham-handed attempts to implement it.
>
> In other words, it is not enough to say an idea is flawed because "I have
> never seen it succeed"... At best, "I have never seen it succeed" means
> you suspect there may be something wrong, but you cannot nail it down to
> whether it is a conceptual problem or an implementation problem.
>
> ..Ch:W..

Wow. An articulation of the problem of induction in a programming context.

Anyone read The Black Swan?

Kurt