An author who sued over a negative review of one of his books demands to know why publishers are now shunning him.A leading business publication asks in a headline, "If mainframe computers are dinosaurs, why is IBM creating a new generation?"
An astronomer threatens to sue a computer company whose engineers have code-named a machine after him, and then is puzzled when they rename it BHA, for "butt-head astronomer."
Are these dumb questions, or what? The answers, which should be obvious even to a BHA, are:
These were the thoughts running through my mind that morning in April as I sorted press releases on the kitchen floor. Just then my cousin Corbett strode in.
"Well, they ripped me off again," he announced, angrily tearing open a bag of Doritos I'd been saving for lunch.
"Who ripped you off this time?" I sighed.
"Those physicists at Fermilab. They've found the top quark."
"I give up. How could the discovery of the top quark possibly have anything to do with ripping you off, Corbett?"
"Because I predicted it," he mumbled, his mouth full of Doritos. "The minute they discovered the bottom quark, I predicted that someone would someday find a top quark. I had a team in Montpellier working on it." He frowned at my bins of press releases. "You just put a Glossy Brochure in the White Office Paper bin."
"Oops. Thanks. Listen, it's bad to use food to ease your depression. Put away the Doritos and I'll tell you something that'll take your mind off your loss."
I filled him in on my theory about the decline in query quality. As I expected, he claimed that he'd already been thinking about it.
"It's absolutely true," he said. "We're doing some research in that area at my R&D company, Smoke&Mirrors. It's a very serious issue in software development, with the current movement toward client-server models and distributed computing and interapplication communication and the information highway and so on."
"How's that?"
"Well, all these technologies involve queries, whether they're called that or not. And our research shows that most people today don't know how to form simple queries. SQL is beyond the reach of most people. They get AND and OR mixed up."
"They don't know how to ask questions, eh? So what are you doing about the situation? Educating people?"
"No, no. We're exploiting their ignorance. We're dumbing down software. For example, we're developing a new kind of language to be embedded in electronic agents that search for information on the Internet and in databases."
"How is that different from what General Magic is doing with TeleScript?"
"TeleScript creates smart agents. Our language creates dumb ones."
I snorted. "That's the stupidest answer I've ever heard."
"Well it's not my fault," he said, tossing the empty Doritos bag in my Cellophane bin. "It was a dumb question."
editor-at-large
Copyright © 1994, Dr. Dobb's Journal