this could be taken the wrong way

[cellio]

In context this made perfect sense. Out of context, I'm glad no managers were walking by at the time.

"Well, if you don't want to do incest, nepotism will work."

(A coworker needed to cons up a relationship diagram with doubly-linked nodes, like a spouse who's also a sibling or a child who's also an employee...)

Comments

[dmnsqrl.livejournal.com]

Sounds like a job for joshwriting

[siderea]

Interesting use of the word "cons" in there, too. LISP, much?

[cellio]

But of course. LISP was the one true language, back in the day. Pity it's faded so much from both the scene and my memory.

[siderea]

Ye gods. You were CMU, right? Was LISP big there, too? (i.e. in addition to where I'm from?)

[cellio]

It was. While I was at CMU I worked on the Common LISP specification, worked a bit on a local implementation, and later worked on the LISP Tutor, a program for teaching students LISP written in -- you guessed it -- LISP. :-) (Except it was written in Franz LISP, which was different from the other dialects I spoke at the time.) In between I worked for a CMU spinoff doing natural-language processing.

At CMU I wrote some locally-useful Emacs extensions, too. The most personally useful were the Coke-machine monitor and the Usenet news reader (later, rightfully, displaced by something much better). (I did not write the famous Coke-machine status checker; I never had that brand of smarts. What I wrote was a little utility that, when the machine was empty, would monitor it (using that existing tool) and let the user know when someone began to fill the machine. The reason this was important was that when the machine showed "empty" there were really two cold Cokes in each column... Yes, even back then caffeine was a critical resident of my blood stream.)

[tangerinpenguin.livejournal.com]

I regularly encounter job applicants who describe one of the key differences between Java and C++ by saying "Java takes care of memory allocation for you so you don't need to think about it."

Less often, I run into Java programmers who talk about "consing up" structures in the course of solving a graph traversal example, or some such. They never, ever refer to garbage collection as something that means "they don't have to think" about how their code uses memory.