If Marriage Was Strongly Typed . . .

Originally published on: 12/19/2006 6:22:23 AM

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.

Comments

dg
commented on 12/19/2006 hehehe

Jeremy
commented on 12/19/2006 Only a true geek would see marriage in the form of computer code! Congrats J. I am not worthy to code in your presence!

J Wynia
commented on 12/20/2006 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.

dg
commented on 12/20/2006 but I thought true geeks didn't have a life...

J Wynia
commented on 12/20/2006 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.

Kevin Marshall
commented on 12/26/2006 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???

Jeremy Bowers
commented on 1/7/2007 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.

Kyle Korleski
commented on 1/9/2007 I see most of my life in computer code. And as a soundtrack too.

PohEe.com
commented on 1/12/2007 Women is hard to understand. This is a point agreed by all the MEN! am i right?

MatÃƒÆ’Ã‚Âas
commented on 1/16/2007 Excellent article!

I've translated it to Spanish if you don't mind.

J Wynia
commented on 1/16/2007 MatÃƒÆ’Ã‚Âas, 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.

Kyle Korleski
commented on 1/24/2007 Lol, that is very funny. I am thinking about translating it to Polish.

keng
commented on 1/24/2007 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.

Daniel Ampuero
commented on 1/24/2007 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!

Mickie
commented on 1/25/2007 Hilariously accurate! Oh how I wish my man understood code!