Posted by Rick DeNatale
Mon, 11 Jun 2007 20:32:00 GMT
Recently, I’ve seen the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis used to motivate new spins on old ideas, such as behavior-driven design. For those unfamiliar with Sapir-Whorf it comes from the school of linquistic determnation, and taken to the extreme posits that a person’s language determines the way he or she thinks.
I’m going to post some thoughts about bdd soon, but this appeal to Saphir-Whorf reminds me of an experience I had about 10 years ago.
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Posted in psychology, war_stories | Tags linguistics, psychology | no comments
Posted by Rick DeNatale
Mon, 12 Mar 2007 16:26:00 GMT
How many times has this happened to you?
You have a really tough bug which defies all attacks. Finally after pondering it for hours, or days or maybe more, you realize that the symptoms you are seeing aren’t due to the posited bug at all, but are really something else.
Some examples.
On ruby-talk, I’ve been trying to help someone who was having problems making Net::SMTP work. He had some code which included:
smtp.open_message_stream('sender@mail.com', ["dummy@dummy.com"]) do
And which was working, except that he really wanted to send an email to an address held in a variable rather than “dummy@dummy.com” He was getting an error if he used ‘a’ variable for the recipient address, and wondered why the array couldn’t take a variable.
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Posted in ruby | Tags debugging, psychology | no comments
