Jessica in Indianapolis, Indiana, says her field of software development, rubber duck applies to a situation where you describe a problem you’re struggling with to someone else, and in the process of explaining it, you hit upon the solution, without any feedback from the listener — a conclusion you would also have reached if you’d simply taken the time to explain it simply to an animate object. This strategy of rubber duck programming was first recorded in a book called The Pragmatic Programmer (Bookshop|Amazon) by David Thomas and Andrew Hunt. Jessica reports that in her office, they also use the term cardboard dog in a similar way. This bit of developer slang appears to have been coined by Texas programmer Stephen J. Baker. This is part of a complete episode.
After our conversation about towns with extremely short names, many listeners wrote to tell us about Why, Arizona. Others pointed out that there are towns called Ely in Iowa, Minnesota, and Nevada. Other super-short appellations include Rye, New...
Debbie from Crawfordsville, Florida, says that when she and her husband reach an impasse while working on something, they’ll say Let’s grok about it, which they use to mean “Let’s think about it.” Grok was coined by...
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