Wagging The Dog

The world has gone mad. When I was a young programmer™, we strived to adjust our programs to reflect reality. If there was a mismatch, there was no doubt where the fault lay: the model was wrong and needed to be fixed.

That idea is so last year. Now, apparently, if your program’s model doesn’t match reality, it’s reality’s fault and reality, not the program, needs to be fixed.

At this point, you’re probably asking yourself what the cause of all this crazy talk is. It’s this. The North Yorkshire Council (in the UK) has decided that street signs, such as “St. Mary’s Walk”, would no longer have apostrophes and perhaps not even the period after “St”. Why? Because it confuses the computers.

If you want to argue that the period after an abbreviation is an anachronism, I’m open to that debate. In my personal notes and logs, I never use them and I write “ten thirty” as 1030 not 10:30. So my objection to the North Yorkshire Council’s plan is not some longing for ye olde grammar. It’s the idea that real people and their artifacts should change just because the people they have programming their computers are too incompetent to deal with things like apostrophes.

Yes, yes. I know all about Little Bobby Tables and the incomprehensible fact that these attacks are still not only possible but endemic. But the fact is, these problems are the programmer’s fault. We do, after all, know how to sanitize input to databases. But gee, that’s boring, and as I said, so last year. Easier to just change reality.

And let’s not even get into the problems arising from letting politicians address technical problems. That never ends well.

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