Unintentional Programming
From our Hot New Technologies Editor
Imagine the setting - you’ve been working on na project for several days, and today is the crunch, everything has to be ready to ship. You’ve taken some code home and fired up your laptop, hacking away into the small hours the night before, and now you’re up early, grabbing a quick breakfast while you look over what you did the night before. In a flash, you realise you’re out of milk. Luckily the corner shop is, well, just round the corner.
You dash out, leaving the workstation running, and a few critical files unsaved. The cat likes the warmth generated by your machine, and walks all over the keyboard while you’re heading back home, accidentally hitting a few choice hot keys that trigger the deletion of your entire project.
There are some 40,000 files in the project directory, so the hard disk is still whirring when you get back in. In your haste to prise cat from keyboard, you accidentally pull the power-cord, forcing a shutdown halfway through the deletion of the project files. Worse, this triggers a partial corruption of the file system, leaving your machine unable to boot.
After a frantic half-hour with the rescue disk, youve got the OS back on its feet, but the project directory structure looks, well, strange. A number of files have been removed, others rearranged, and there’s some well-forme XML that you’ve neer seen before, which can only have been generated by the cat while rolling on the keyboard. With trepidation, you run a build and deploy, and everything works.
The seasoned developers amongst us will, of course, recognise this situation from first-hand experience. The only thing that has prevented it from going mainstream has been a snappy name. Until now, that is. 2006 is going to be the year in which Unintentional Programming goes mainstream, mark our words.