Re: Merging elements

On Fri, October 28, 2011 9:14 am, Nic Gibson wrote:
...
> I'm always impressed with the way our minds work - you step away from a
> problem, ask someone else and the act of expressing the problem to someone
> else allows you to think of a solution.

Sometimes called "Debug by Describing" [1].

It's sometimes said that explaining out loud helps, too.  And it's often
said that you don't need to explain it to another person for it to be
effective.  Seems the oldest reference for explaining to an inanimate
object is the teddy bear example [2] in "The Practice of Programming" by
Brian W Kernighan & Rob Pike.  Sometimes called "Bear programming" [3]
(possibly as a play on "pair programming"), and it appears the practice
still continues [4][5].

Sometimes also called the "Cardboard Programmer" [6], since the person you
talk to might as well be a cardboard cut-out.  One of the comments on the
c2.com page about this jokes about getting pictures of Extreme Programming
luminaries to use as their Cardboard Programmer.  Maybe (as I struggle
desperately to bring the topic back to XSLT) we could debug by describing
things to the front cover of "XSLT 2.0 and XPath 2.0 Programmer's
Reference"?


Tony Graham                                   tgraham@xxxxxxxxxx
Consultant                                 http://www.mentea.net
Mentea       13 Kelly's Bay Beach, Skerries, Co. Dublin, Ireland
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[1] http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?DebugByDescribing
[2] http://f2.org/humour/programming/
[3] http://gojko.net/2007/12/26/bear-programming/
[4]
http://palojono.blogspot.com/2011/03/teddy-bear-problem-solving-method.html
[5] http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?RubberDucking
[6] http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?CardboardProgrammer