[TUHS] Re: Documentation (was On Bloat and the Idea of Small Specialized Tools)

[Phil Budne <phil@ultimate.com>]

Yeechang Lee:
> My understanding is that an unexpected result of the requirement to
> draft all federal laws in Canada in both English and French is
> something similar: The discussion process ensuring that a bill's
> meaning is identical in both languages helps rid the text of
> ambiguities and errors regardless of language.

It always seemed to me that ISO standards were written to be equally
incomprehensible in all languages, substituting terms like Protocol
Data Unit (PDU) for familiar ones like Packet.

In the early Internet, where there wasn't ANY money to be made in
antisocial conduct, it was easier to justify sentiments like "Rough
consensus and working code" and "be liberal in what you accept".

Lest ye forget, "industry standards" were once limited to things like
magnetic patterns on half-inch tape and the serial transmission of
bits, and at the LOWEST of levels.  Reading a tape written on another
vendor's system wasn't easy when I got started in the early 80's; In
addition to ASCII and EBCDIC, there were still systems with
vendor-specific 6-bit character sets, never mind punched cards.  I
remember going on a campus tour in the late 70's where there was an
ASCII terminal hooked up to some system that had BASIC (the standard
at the time was ANSI "Minimal BASIC"; a full(er) standard took long
enough that it was dead on arrival), but instead of "RETURN" required
typing CTRL/C (defined in ASCII as End Of Text) to enter a line!

In that context, getting ANYTHING working across vendors was a
victory, and having one system refuse to speak to another because of
some small detail in what one of them considered reasonable (or not)
was asking for trouble.

The times and stakes today are distinctly different.