Neil Hopcroft

A digital misfit

Assistant: “Can I help you sir?”
Me: “I was wondering if you had any more books?”
He proudly leads me back to the aisle full of ‘Computing for seniors’ books that I’ve just visited.
“What are you looking for sir?”
“I’m after a book on C#, I found this one but the topic I’m interested in is mentioned only in a line of a table on page 658, I’d really like a book that covers the topic in more depth. Do you have any other books on C#?”
“That is all we have, what is the topic you need such information about?”
“Recommendations for linkage between managed and unmanaged code for third party distributable libraries, ideally packaging of both into a single DLL, but I realise that is probably a little ambitious.”
“Oh”


3 comments

    • Maybe…but what I’m after is some kind of an official guideline about interface style rather than a description of how it works. The internet, wonderful though it is, is rather full of people who want to sound like they know what they are talking about. It is difficult for me to figure out which ones to pay attention to. At least if someone went to the effort of putting it in a book they have some kind of authority.

  1. I have a further post brewing about the death of complexity…I offered a somewhat simplified explanation of the problem for the benefit of the assistant.

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