If KFC can legally call this “food”, then I guess it can be a sandwich too:
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Low carb!
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Except for the half pound of breading…
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Open face sandwich
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What of the grilled cheese!!!
A hamhock in your cornflakes…
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An open-faced sandwich is a sandwich only if it is served with the top piece of bread on the side, intended for purposes of customizing the sandwich before final assembly. (A lot of burger places serve exactly that way, for example.) An open-faced “sandwich” that is clearly meant to be eaten with a knife & fork instead of hands is absolutely not a sandwich at all, any more than a slice of buttered toast is a sandwich. Utility is the most useful quality to categorize on here, but even that runs into grey areas like this gimmicky nonsense:
It’s a sandwich in form, but not in essence. Is an umbrella with the fabric torn off still an umbrella? This pile of meat is the inverse of that umbrella skeleton, a debased perversion occupying the lacunae of meaning.
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…well 2 out of 3 are edible!
yeah, makes it a lot more confusing since they throw a bunch of inedible examples into the mix.
those aren’t even foods, they are monstrosities!
Yes. There are almost always edge case items, exception items, items that fit multiple categories, etc. categories are fuzzy groupings to loosely sort and group, which has great benefit for many logical and cognitive processes but seldom clearly delineated sets
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I can’t remember where I read it, but there was a long paper on designing forms for software and the web that went over about 200 rules you can’t use for standard name definitions.
Things like some names don’t have a capital letter at the beginning.
Some names have more than one capital letter
Some names are all caps
You can’t assume someone has a middle name
Some names don’t have vowels
The list goes on.
Basically the point was that any set of rules you use for form-checking on real-world data are going to exclude someone or be so broad as to be pointless anyway.
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i often clean up these issues in code from US companies, because US programmers are notorious for not accounting for internationalization when coding, and when a company expands international…sh*t breaks. What do you mean every country doesn’t have states or 7 number zip codes? What do you mean ขวัญจิต is a name?
I also often craft regex for form validations to enforce valid data entry, and unless something has a clearly defined spec, like domain names, or email addresses, then you are absolutely correct that trying to enforce valid data can have the consequence of excluding valid data that your rules didn’t account for.
Just ask the artist formerly known as prince, who is now back to prince, because having a symbol for a name, especially a symbol not included in the unicode set, is a recipe for tons of headaches, from passports to taxes.
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Well… Doesn’t Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem sort of show that any set of rules for something as wide ranging as names can’t ever cover all cases?
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Yeah, for names you pretty much have to give up and say a unicode string of characters 1 or more characters long. Because you have to enter it somehow and that covers as many of the languages as is reasonably possible.
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Oh look, this is easy. Whether or not something is a sandwich or not depends entirely on what the guys in marketing think.
Ask them.
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I remember that list!
You can’t assume that someone’s name doesn’t change.
You can’t assume that someone only has 1 name.
You can’t assume that you can refer to someone using that name.
You can’t assume that someone HAS a name.
That was a fun read; I can’t find it for the life of me though.
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This really grates my Parmesan and toasts my bread–@doctorow, why didn’t you just ask me what a sandwich is?
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@tekk That list is here: Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names.
(The last assumption is “people have names.” Which, okay, you can have no name if you want to I guess, but your recalcitrantly pain-in-the-ass idiosyncracy is not my data validation problem, John Doe #17. (Besides, there’s only one Man With No Name in my book, and he didn’t exactly fill out a lot of forms.))
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I do greatly enjoy that blog entry, it has been a number of years since I read it. My favorites are:
Alright, alright, within a year or so of birth.
Five years?
You’re kidding me, right?
Some day I will write a similar piece about Time. Jebus holy FSM, Time is stupid.
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Already been covered pretty well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5wpm-gesOY
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I got two minutes and twenty one seconds in and wanted to throw my phone agaisnt the wall, precisely for the reasons he mentioned.
THIS IS A FUNNY BIT, NOT AN INSULT
Names? Blob.
Time? Is there a FUCK YOU field?
