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Technology Stocks : Wind River going up, up, up! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: hueyone who wrote (8461)	9/13/2000 11:10:44 PM
From: Allen Benn	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 10309

Have you copyrighted "lily pond" and "yalp"? The credit for the metaphor goes to Kevin Kelly, the editor at large of Wired Magazine, who presented it in an intriguing monograph on the subject of the New Economy. I hope the Lily Pond metaphor catches on because I think it is useful to capture, in a single, non-technical phrase, an extremely important concept about how geometric growth occurs in networks. For the same reason, I like the use of “gorilla” to describe not just a big, powerful company, but one that dominates a market in special ways. yalp, which I did coin, has lots of special meanings. First, let me congratulate you on spelling it without capitals, even though it was derived as an acronym. I used upper case letters to emphasize its derivation, but the proper usage is with lower case letters. The wonderful world of Unix is replete with understatement, which I would argue is the philosophical tone that underlies modern day open source movements. When Unix pioneers implemented a universal metacompiler capability with a front-end lexical parser, the straightforward parser was appropriately named “lex”. However, the back-end metacompiler was named “yacc”, which in their understated minds stood for “yet another compiler compiler.” As if to emphasize the understatement, the spelling is in Unix-traditional lower case for verbs. Now, understand that compilers are difficult things to write, so it stands to reason that a compiler for writing compilers is an exquisitely abstract concept. To simply call any metacompiler “yet another” takes understatement to a new level. (Somewhat equivalent is the when the Unix expert stated that “Unix is the best OS in the world”, then corrected him/herself by adding, “Actually, it is better than that.”) In a similar fashion, owning a developing lily pond is a really big deal. If any company ever finds itself in control of a true-to-life, real-world lily pond, that company should thank the technology gods for such blessings. Thus, to refer to an emerging lily pond for any company as “yet another” has mind-boggling implications for that company’s overall business model, apparently soon to benefit from numerous such ponds. So, yalp is an understated way of screaming, “I can’t believe it; they have another lily pond!” Since embedded software engineers have familiarity with Unix and the tradition of understatement, they would know immediately the deeper meanings of yalp, especially as it would remind them of yacc. Consequently, it embarrasses me to state the obvious, but I feel compelled to let non-technical readers share in these embedded delights. Allen