bikeshedding

Robert Henderson rmh at UCSC.EDU
Tue Jul 24 15:57:05 UTC 2012


Here's a nice example of a verb I haven't seen before. It isn't in the
OED and hasn't been talked talked about on the listserv before. Thought
y'all might like it!

"Go's strict formatting rules and its "only one way to do things"
philosophy mean we don't waste much time bikeshedding about style."

http://backstage.soundcloud.com/2012/07/go-at-soundcloud/

The bike shed metaphor comes from a Poul-Henning Kamp post on the
FreeBSD listserv where arguing over the color of the bikeshed is used as
a canonical example of how people tend to argue about trivial things
because they are easy to grasp and thus easy to argue over. Or "the
amount of noise generated by a change is inversely proportional to the
complexity of the change."

Robert

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