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Principle of Auntie Emma
She was just
a janitor in a big-iron computing center, in charge of handing the printouts
to users (in those days they had no terminals of their own, they did data
entry to audio casettes and got the printouts couple of days later). Once
a programmer came to his guru to ask about a problem he had, "well, you
see, I got to do this, but can't, because of this... I mean, if I could
use the... but... on the other hand... yes, that's it! Thank you!"
"Thank me for what? I didn't say a word. You could have told your story
to Auntie Emma as well".
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| OK, this is a programming
thing, but it's not a joke, so what's the point? |
just putting the problem into words and telling someone,
often forces us to (re-)think it down a different path, and quite often
this actually yields a solution.
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This was provoked by a David Marlin's helping himself by posting a problem and answering to it right away; see message 451431 at the site previously known as UniversalThread, and the rest of that thread.
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