Look, turn it around. His statement doesn’t pass the sanity test. Does, he, or you, really think the main reason systems don’t deal well with entering spaces or hyphens into phone numbers is merely the sheer jerkiness of programmers? Are they that powerful, that an obvious interface ease-of-use spec can be stopped by their “passively-aggressively requires” at whim?

Finding out the answer to why a given system is so “rigorous” might be an interesting investigation. It’s too easy to say that it’s because the programmer is a passive-aggressive jerk (this holds even if the programmer happens to be a passive-aggressive jerk – that still doesn’t necessarily make it the reason!).

http://imdb.com/title/tt0044446/

Because Yeager’s flight was highly classified at the time, the film was many people’s first encounter with a story of a pilot breaking the long-thought-unbreakable sound barrier. They assumed it was based on fact, so the “British pilot was first” meme was born.

Dave, thanks for the details. Ted conditioned his claim by saying that he was told this by someone who heard it first-hand from Yeager and that he (Ted) trusts the veracity of his source. Obviously, that doesn’t mean the story is true, but that’s the chain of evidence Ted presented.

Seth, Ted was pointing to modern instances of “Don’t enter hyphens” where memory isn’t an issue. So, he may be wrong in his explanation but are you saying that engineers trained in days of memory scarcity have been unable to adapt to memory abundance? That seems pretty unlikely to me. So does your hypothesis that engineers think a using some regular expression code is likely to “introduce errors.”

The no-hyphens policy these days strikes me as a case of design failure – someone along the way was a jerk – but I don’t think we need to conclude that the engineers committing it are passive-aggressive. Maybe they’re lazy, maybe the project was rushed, were required to follow inadequate specs, or maybe they think users ought to be asked to carry some of the burden, or something else. It’s hard to psychoanalyze people on the basis of their string handling (despite the Freudian overtone).

While programmers might be jerks, it’s not mere desire to frustrate users. It’s that whole systems used to need to run in memory constraints less than what people now have on their keychains, and the languages were on the whole not friendly to string processing. Much easier to say “Don’t enter spaces or hyphens”, than to spend precious resources and introduce potential errors over it. One can punditificate “That’s wrong!”, and that the cost is worth it – but that’s a different argument, not that programmers are jerks.

There’s no way Yeager could have “gone orbital,” no friggin’ way. If if were that easy Burt Rutan would have done it already, and it’s simply not.

There is a lot of political fighting in the history of America’s first orbital shot, and Von Braun could have gotten us there before the Russians, but that’s another story.

Parochially, I’m sad to say it was Navy’s Vanguard that was the basket into which all our orbital eggs were laid, and when it became clear that no way was Vanguard ready for prime time, it was the Army and Von Braun’s Redstone that stepped into the breech.

But no way was the Bell X-1 able to achieve anything remotely approaching orbital velocity (~17,000 mph).

I can’t help but think that his conceptions for organizing information, via both Xanadu/Translit and ZigZag, has much to do with his ADHD, and his need to attempt to gain some measure of control of his hyperawareness.

Your reference to ZigZag is a little off: it’s ZigZag, not ZigZig, and the URL is:

http://www.nongnu.org/gzz/gi/gi.html

From what I can tell, ZigZag could represent facets, but wouldn’t limit each facet to being mutually exclusive terms.