Karakuri Babble is a daily column by the editors of i360.com, usually on topics tangentially related to anime and cosplay.

In the past we have endorsed many things; in the future we shall support many others.

I know, I know, I've been missing days. If I apologized, I would. It sounds like a tautology, so I will protest that that makes it doubly true -- true in both the literal sense, and in that in which I meant it.

Anyway, today I had occasion to think about an excellent column by the War Against Silence guy. Opening line: "I've come to the unexpected and disconcerting realization that my period of greatest apparent productivity in user-interface production was, pretty clearly, when I was mainly working in Visual Basic".

He's also famously long-winded, but I think that his main point is in this bit from the middle:

. . .seeing and/or editing simple pieces of known data accounts for about 94% of the code ever written for computers, and that seeing and editing more-complex clumps of known data accounts for another 6%. All the stuff that does something with that data, and for which a computer is more than a very expensive and quickly obsolescent filing cabinet, at this level of precision accounts for approximately 0%

That one's always seemed especially true to me -- I spend most of my time patiently explaining to one group of computers how to talk to another group, and sometimes it's pretty wearing. Most of the time I just want the data to be preserved in a reasonable form.

Quickly-obsolescent filing cabinet, indeed.

So why am I mentioning this? Actually, just because it's something I've enjoyed reading, and I think you might as well. There's more to my life than Japanese pop culture, right?

words from chris, 2009-04-03 02:25:30, los angeles