[TT] When they ask, Who (or What) was this written by ?

[Richmond Mathewson]

[TT] - Totally Tangential.

Speaking as a happily married person (just thinking about how that mucks 
up marriage statistics makes it even happier) both my wife and I would 
find it pretty tough to claim 100% authorship of anything; well, except in 
those arguments where she says that one of our sons is 100% like me :)

As a person who doesn't feel to bad about plundering code (as well as 
shoving a lot of mine around for others to plunder) I can honestly say 
that my maximum input on anyone project is about 75%; even if the other 
25% consisted of supplying hot drinks, keeping the kids out of the way, 
cooking meals, cleaning the house - I would have been hard-put to complete 
a lot of work without that support.

So, whether Albert Einstein's wives were quiet geniuses spoon-feeding 
"stupid Bert", or whether they were "just" his support crew doesn't really 
matter: their contribution should be acknowledged.

Skaespeare ripped-off everything, left, right, and centre: it is what he 
did with the material he gathered that constitutes genius.

Of course there are Shakespearian 'scholars' (and those single quotes are 
meant to signify that they are a fairly worthless crowd) who worry about 
whether that wonderful turn of phrasing in Richard II's soliliquoy is 100% 
Shakespeare, or whether the first adjective was thought up by another 
lurking genius: does it matter? Not one wit: "The play's the thing!"

"And so to a little coding" . . . to misquote that unsung hero of 
software development, Mr Samuel Pepys.

sincerely, Richmond Mathewson.
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A Thorn in the flesh is better than a failed Systems Development Life Cycle.
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