A little on the Java Tech Forum i went to last friday. One of the speakers was showing code snippets and in one of his examples, he used an abitrary constant. The value of the constant was 42. And he went like, "Do any of u noe the meaning of the number 42?"

No one could answer. Or maybe there are those who read Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and know what the speaker was prodding at. "It's the answer to life!", he exclaimed, "But no one knows what the question was." At this point, he fails to make any reference to Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, successfully dumbfounding a whole theatre of audience.

And we wonder why people stereotype software developers as living in their own world. Perhaps it is because they don't see a need to communicate with entities living just beyond their world, mainly due to no one being able to understand them if they (the developers) did.

Which brings the point to talking about software developers and their product. Somewhere along the long arduous journey of learning, they forgot the purpose of what they're doing, which is to create a tool for users. They begin to stuff what they assume as good for users into their programs/websites, failing utterly to even ask for any feedback. Then they push the product online, and when it fails, they blame it on unexpected traffic, first version hiccups and even poor Murphy and his law.

Obtw, 42 in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is not the "answer to life". It is the answer to the meaning of life. The meaning of the number 42, is unknown.