Context: Something that didn't work in Melange before, suddenly started to work without any known reason.

“Sometimes computer science is not really science, it's astrology!” Mario

Context: Reviewal of tests which Praveen wrote.

“**For testing, you want to test as much as possible. For coding, you may want to code as few as possible. :)”** Leo

Context: When there is a divergence between a local repo and central mercurial repo and if one tries to push to the central repo.

"hg warns you but it says if you still want to shoot yourself in the foot, go ahead, here is the gun and it gives you hg push -f option. -f is the real gun to shoot yourself in the foot.:D " Madhushudan

Context: Rebasing of changesets.

“There are two schools of thought. They are really really “SCHOOLS OF THOUGHT”, so loudly :P. There is always a flame war between the two groups. One of the faction- the faction of “Purists” claim that no history should ever be rewritten or misrepresented. But there is another faction, I call them “Whatever-ists” :P. They don't mind if small changes are missed up.” Madhushudan

Context: Asking the developers the reason behind some design choices, they responded giving blame to other libraries we're using.

“I hear a lot of proper nouns and not enough apologizing” Nathaniel

Context: Triaging issue 1921 (on Google Code)

“Yes, I think this is fixed, but it's fixed in the same way as closing a toilet seat instead of flushing it.” Daniel

From June 2013 Melange All Hands

Context: After a new change from Mario has been pushed to a ninja release and it didn't work.

“It works locally!” Mario

Inspirational quotes from the board

Nathaniel

  • “Show me your flowchart and conceal your tables, and I shall continue to be mystified. Show me your tables, and I won‘t usually need your flowchart; it’ll be obvious” (Brooks, “Mythical Man-Month”)
  • “Make illegal states impossible” (Minsky)
  • “Amateurs practice until they get it right; professionals practice until they cannot get it wrong.” (unknown)
  • “Symbolic is better than literal” (Nathaniel)

Madhusudan

  • “Work expands to fill the amount of time available” (Parkinson's law)

From January 2014 Melange All Hands

“Spite-driven Software Development. It works!” Nathaniel

I still remember your rant... sorry... “constructive reevaluation” DrewR to Nathaniel

Context: About encapsulation of related types in an object to be passed to functions.

“There is a thingness to it.” Nathaniel

Context: When choosing the “fun activity” for the week.

“You want a fun activity? Pick something from the issue tracker!” Daniel

February 2014

“I would not do that myself. I just included that option because you like injecting stuff in constructors.” Daniel to Nathaniel