Re: [9fans] german keymap

[Charles Forsyth <forsyth@terzarima.net>]

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i think it's also important that the unexpected use be one that
applies the program in its proper function, just in a way not anticipated
by the original design.  indeed, that seems to be the whole point!
it's not just using a screwdriver to pry open a tin!

for instance, the traditional example of the pipeline for spelling checking application applies
several commands in turn in a way that is perfectly reasonable, and understandable,
but the composition to do spelling checking was not anticipated by those who wrote
the commands.  in that pipeline in Software Tools, concat concatenates files,
translit does its normal transliteration, sort sorts, unique eliminates duplicates,
and `common' compares lines from two files as usual, but in this case one file is a dictionary.

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From: Geoff Collyer <geoff@collyer.net>
To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu
Subject: Re: [9fans] german keymap
Date: Sun, 11 Apr 2004 17:06:06 -0700
Message-ID: <d732df90deca6fe59d78050a7b1c7c24@collyer.net>

I think he's latching onto a comment, probably in Software Tools, that
one measure of a good tool is that people find uses for it other than
those anticipated by its author(s).  But, yes, it first has to be a
sharp tool that does one thing well.