True words aren’t spoken
More truth, more contradiction
For truth dislikes words

• Seven reasons prospects don’t want to hire IT consultants | TechRepublic
  8. They have no budget. OK… next!
  Tags: techrepublic consulting
• The Anti-Mac User Interface (Don Gentner and Jakob Nielsen)
  Don't get stuck in the GUI stuff
  Tags: ui gui language
• html2text function in Ruby – The Devel!
  Looks useful
  Tags: html2text html ruby regex

As I was walking the dogs this morning along our usual route, Halley and Harry stopped to sniff a greasy spot in the road which had been occupied the day before by an unlucky squirrel. “Hmm… some other scavenger must have cleaned it up,” I thought, then corrected myself: “scavenger, or scavengers.”

English has no specific form to indicate “one or more” — nouns can be singular or plural, not (usually) inclusive of both. The more advanced syntax for Regular Expressions uses ‘+’ to indicate this set. I propose that we adopt this into English, as in “some other scavenger+ must have cleaned it up.” That would naturally cause some consternation for present tense verbs when one of these nouns is the subject, but we could use the same ending there: “The scavenger+ eat+ all the dead squirrels.” (I never understood why the ‘s’ occurs on singular verbs instead of on the plural).

Of course, in a regex /scavenger+/ would mean “scavenge” followed by one or more “r”s. We’d need to say /(scavenger)+/ instead.

Wait, that isn’t right either — that just indicates one or more occurrences of the word scavenger. Not one or more scavengers. Abstract symbols are a bit foreign to Regexen, but they do exist in the more advanced syntaxen. Take Ruby’s, for example:

/(#{scavenger})+/

Now that says,”one or more of what the word ‘scavenger’ represents.”

The English language is not nearly so rigorous. Take the plural, for instance. You might think that a regex equivalent for “scavengers” would be:

/(#{scavenger}){2,}/

That says, “two or more of what the word ‘scavenger’ represents.”

In English, though, we also use the plural form for zero. “Yes, we have no bananas.” Let’s add that ambiguity to our expression:

/((#{banana}){2,})*/

The star says, “zero or more of the previous pattern” — so this accurately represents the idea of “two or more bananas, or none at all”.

Of course, in English I could use the singular form for zero as well: “Yes, we have no banana.” That would carry the connotation that we could have exactly one banana, but we don’t. We’re going to need a smarter squirrel.

• guest@xkcd
  Try 'su', as well as 'sudo make me a sandwich'
  Tags: xkcd unix
• Teabonics on Flickr – Photo Sharing!
  Here's a tea-spewer.
  Tags: politics teaparty irony language
• Ruling rips a hole in patented genes | Good Morning Silicon Valley
  Patent my ass (someone might actually try to).
  Tags: genes patents

• Scott Adams Blog: Man Points 03/08/2010
  (-1 for thinking he needed to clean up)
  Tags: male testosterone humor tools scott-adams dilbert
• Bugging bugs: Learning to speak microbe – life – 05 March 2010 – New Scientist
  Why don't they all just get on Twitter? #twitterbug
  Tags: microbes language medicine bacteria
• A bit of Haskell — Chip’s Tips for Developers
  I've always liked a good Curry.
  Tags: haskell fp chipstips

• Weird (JPG)
  Take it to heart.
  Tags: philosophy humor comics weird system:filetype:jpg system:media:image
• Google’s New Language: Go : Good Math, Bad Math
  Good Go, Bad Go.
  Tags: golang googlego google-go programming language
• Beware ‘frighteningly bad’ Flash flaw, say researchers | Security Central – InfoWorld
  Another reason to avoid Flash like the plague: it is the plague.
  Via the Code Project.
  Tags: flash security

• Go Language Design FAQ
  Go figure.
  Tags: programming go google language design concurrency
• Prioritize consulting tasks by mapping them to client goals | IT Consultant | TechRepublic.com
  tasks.sort {|task1,task2| task1.goals.total(:priority) <=> task2.goals.total(:priority) }
  Tags: techrepublic consulting projectmanagement goals
• 500 Internal Server Error
  500 Internal Server Error
  Tags: none

• Eunoia : Stu Savory’s Blog – July 2009
  A rose by any other name might use more bandwidth
  Tags: stusavory names namingconventions language
• God No! …The ReBuilder
  I'd call it ELMS, for Entry-Level Minion Simulator
  Tags: coding humor leonbambrick
• Planning one’s death at the end of a long illustrious life | Dangerous Intersection
  Way to go.
  Tags: suicide dignity freedom

• Rands In Repose: The Words You Wear
  Heads up => "you're screwed"
  Tags: humor communication buzzwords jargon marketing rands
• Ending the Era of Patronizing Language Design
  Right on target — the best thing I've read about programming language design in years. Thanks, Reg.
  Tags: programming language metaprogramming responsibility design
• Synergy-e-Quiz answers: black and blue
  When operator overloading leaves you down and out
  Tags: synergyde overloading oop

• Point of style in C coding conventions — Chip’s Tips for Developers
  Keeping your asterisk out of trouble.
  Tags: c cplusplus pointers indirection coding conventions
• SPACE.com — Long Shot: Planet Could Hit Earth in Distant Future
  “While it’s possible that a collision could occur billions of years from now, it’s actually very unlikely.”
  Enter Murphy, stage right
  Tags: space astronomy planets
• The Global Language Monitor » Blog Archive » Welcome to the Million Word March
  Web 2.0 is the millionth English word? It isn’t even a word!
  Tags: english language