Lit. crit.

Re-reading my previous "On being unfashionable" post (don't you re-read your own posts?) reminded me of my favourite piece of literary criticism.

Philip Marlowe, private detective and hero of many a Raymond Chandler novel, finds himself being interviewed by a beautiful, mysterious, rich woman (don't we all). At the end of the interview, Marlowe offers her chauffeur a five-dollar tip, which he politely declines. Marlowe then offers him the collected works of T.S.Eliot, which the chauffeur also declines - he already has them. The next time they meet, the chauffeur has a question for Marlowe:

"What does it mean when he says, 'In the room the women come and go/and speak of Michelangelo'?"

Marlowe answers, "It means he doesn't know much about women."

The chauffeur replies, "Yes, that's what I thought."

(Quoted from memory, so feel free to correct me. I believe it's from The Long Goodbye but my Chandlers are all in an attic in east London.)

I've been busy testing and revising my database project lately, after translating it into English. It's amazing how many previously unnoticed bugs and pieces of faulty thinking this has brought to light. Things that I and my colleagues have been looking at daily for years (literally) are seen in English as though for the first time, and we are constantly saying "Does it really need to do that there?" or "Wouldn't this be better here?". On the other hand, this experience has also let me see the database as it really is, for the first time in a long while, and I have to say that it looks good.

My great-uncle Titch used to say that "you can always get seven drops out of an empty bottle." There is a similar truism in programming, that buggy routines stay buggy no matter how many mistakes you correct in them. One of my core routines has proven this true, it's about four years old now and still throws up new failures every half-year or so. I know that I shall have to rewrite it, and have been averting my eyes from this fact for about three years. However, I very much fear that the time has now come.