Technology; Progress

[ljplicease]

Two observations worth remembering:

Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

The second observation was made by Douglas Adams, and I'm having trouble relocating the exact quote, but in essence he said that whether an object can be defined as "technology" can be determined by the "tea" test. That is,

1. Make a hot cup of tea.
2. Try to figure out how the object in question works.
3. If, by the time you are done or by the time you give up the tea is cold, then you are almost certainly dealing with technology.

Here is a screencap of Micro$oft Word: I leave it as an exercise for the reader to get my point.

Also: why is it that language designers hate Multiple inheritance so much? We used it to good effect when I was working at IBM, and it seems to work pretty well for creating people.