If Marriage Was Strongly Typed . . .
If marriage was strongly typed, then asking my wife what time she's going to be home would return a timestamp. Similarly, asking if she'll be home for dinner would return a boolean. However, since marriage is a loosely typed language, both questions usually return an array. In the array is a list of the things she has to do before she can come home.
To properly parse this response, you actually need to estimate the duration of each item on the list, total the estimates, tack on about 20% for overrun and factor in the commute. Only when you've run the response through this wrapper method can you actually get the timestamp you were looking for. And, if you were looking for a boolean, you need to then compare your timestamp against the timestamp for dinner and see which is greater.
So, in essence, having a good marriage is like working in a loosely typed language and you've just got to have really good exception handling. Once you've built up a good library of wrapper methods for how your spouse communicates, things can just cruise right along and work smoothly.
Or I guess you can throw an exception to be handled by the divorce() method. But that seems like a pretty bad approach.
December 19th, 2006 at 8:13 am
hehehe
December 19th, 2006 at 9:52 am
Only a true geek would see marriage in the form of computer code! Congrats J. I am not worthy to code in your presence!
December 20th, 2006 at 4:11 am
It's not just marriage. I tend to see most of life in terms of software. I've often thought of writing a self-help book for geeks for how to debug your life.
December 20th, 2006 at 7:54 am
but I thought true geeks didn't have a life…
December 20th, 2006 at 9:01 am
While that definitely seems true of younger geeks, a surprisingly large percentage of the 30+ geek population is married and manages to function in society reasonably well. I'm not sure if it just takes geeks longer to figure it out or if the definition of "a life" shrinks to meet the growing experience of geeks.
When you're 21, sitting at home with one other person watching TV with a laptop on your lap is seriously geeky. Most people that age would thing you should be "out" and "doing something". By the time you're 31, that expectation isn't nearly what it was and more non-geeks are doing pretty much just that.
In other words, I think as many people get older, their behavior tends to drift toward the behavior of geeks as the same thing tends to happen to geeks.
December 26th, 2006 at 12:55 pm
If my wife understood your post, I would probably be approaching a strongly-typed marriage. As it is… I guess a pythonic relationship has its own charms.
I wonder what frame of reference my wife wishes I saw our relationship in???
January 7th, 2007 at 9:37 am
Ah, but you don't end up with a "timestamp", you end up with a IndeterminateTimestamp, which is a timestame with a sigma parameter indicating the width of the normal distribution around the computed time.
And you pretty much just have to guess the sigma value.
January 9th, 2007 at 6:48 am
I see most of my life in computer code. And as a soundtrack too.
January 12th, 2007 at 9:44 am
Women is hard to understand. This is a point agreed by all the MEN! am i right?
January 16th, 2007 at 3:41 am
Excellent article!
I've translated it to Spanish if you don't mind.
January 16th, 2007 at 7:45 am
MatÃas, you go right ahead. That's why I've got this whole site licensed Creative Commons Attribution. Feel free to do whatever you want with the content on this site, just leave my name attached and it's all good.
January 24th, 2007 at 1:02 am
Lol, that is very funny. I am thinking about translating it to Polish.
January 24th, 2007 at 12:37 pm
If my wife a. knew what this meant b. knew that i almost laughed OUT LOUD right in the middle of my cube-farm I'm thinking she SleepOnCouch("husband" 2) function would have been executed.
BTW: the only way to kill a SleepOnCouch() function is to call FlowersBigTime() function.
January 24th, 2007 at 8:00 pm
This was one of the best jokes in the whole week. By the way, I think that, considering the definition of a young geek, I'm one of those! I'm 21 and my only fun is to sit in my computer seat all the night… Sometimes I think that is really patetic, but WTF! To hell everything!.
CYA!
January 25th, 2007 at 8:09 pm
Hilariously accurate! Oh how I wish my man understood code!