Code Talks
Today I have been spending too much timeworking withencoding issues in utf-8, utf-16, base64, binHex, etc. Encoding is like metadata, in the sense that one person’s encoded stream is another’s decoded stream. Anyway, Dave’s comments today about “shut up and code” (paraphrased), made me think of the great yEnc debate. When yEnc first appeared, the purists freaked out, warning “YOUR CHILDREN ARE IN TERRIBLE DANGER!” But it took only six months for yEnc to become a defacto standard, and now a whole generation of kids will never know what UUENCODE was. The reason was implementation; the spec was aimed at coders rather than purists, and several quality implementations appeared almost overnight. And it worked! And nobody died!