Dare Obsanjo‘s article, Brendan Eich on Mozilla and the Future of AJAX, has some interesting points, but this note won’t be commenting on those (although I may do so later on).

However, in the entry, the following snippet is found:

open_source + open_standards != user_driven_innovations;

Now, while I don’t have any trouble understanding Dare’s point, there’s just one little thing that annoys me with this approach: It doesn’t really make sense, from a programming perspective.

First of all, declaring the sum of two variables isn’t possible in any language I’ve ever heard of (think about it — what would be the value of each variable?). But more importantly, you can’t negatively declare a variable, meaning, you can’t define what it’s not. != is used in comparison only.

I see this rather often on IRC and such. The thinking seems to be that you can define what a value is, thus you can also define what it’s not. But that doesn’t make sense. It’s a smart ass way of intermingling programming with your writing, but makes you seem like you’re really not (smart, that is).

By all means, do define what things are not. Just don’t put in some hot shot mathematical formula, trying to look cool. You don’t.

(But again, this doesn’t have anything to do with the article itself — that’s a whole different story. Again, maybe more later.)