shaver

It was very sweet of Mom to mail me and say that she wasn’t at all hurt by my flagrant disregard for her birthday. Even if it’s true, though, I still feel kinda bad.

More bug fixing at work, and 15 minutes of utter terror on the phone with Phil before we realized that we hadn’t actually designed a requirement for Impossibilium into our precious software. Instead, I just have to throw out a few days’ work on recovery fixups, but I’m not too upset. (Just between you and me, I’d done some pretty ugly stuff.)

Jacob is correct, of course, in his assertion that language needs to serve its users. Aven and I discussed this briefly — well, she lectured me a little bit, and I made some pointless and content-free reply — as well, and the OED has, as we all know, always been built on submissions and whatnot. But once you wipe away my overstated and bitter interjections, my real point is that, as in software design, you don’t just add somethig because a user asked for it. More than just the submitter has to use the resulting language, just as a given application will be used by more people than set-of-one who thinks it needs a big red button for flipping the display upside-down. People who use the language are obviously — maybe not obviously, OK, but if I say obviously it will perhaps keep people from disagreeing as casually — the right people to be guiding it forwad, but simple ignorance shouldn’t be the basis of the evolution of a language. But maybe I shouldn’t come down so hard on ignorance, because I used to be very annoyed at the simple existence of “administrate“, before I discovered that it wasn’t simply a faux root of “administrator”. I guess I simply fear for the loss of beauty, elegance, and even function that so frequently accompanies universal input. (mpt can tell you all about that.) What happened to the glory of elitism, anyway?

I’m really frustrated with Mozilla right now — the project, I mean; the software still serves me admirably — and I’m wondering if maybe I don’t need a cleaner break than simply not doing it for a living. Might be time to get off the staff and drivers lists, but then the vast majority of my email would start to bounce. Boy, that’d be a pain. Ah well, back to complaining about sloppy approvals and bogus “design” documents.

I’m pretty cranky these days. I think I need to get more sleep, or something.