remembering meme pebbles in the pool

this was shortly before slauti met kris for the first time in his life.

'Twas on the same day I met Brian Foote, the guy with reportedly the best joke/minute rate in the programming conferences world. As far as I know, Brian is the author of the 'xml is diet cobol' meme.

A while ago Tobi Schäfer remembered the Diet Cobol meme and asked a question as to its exact meaning of wether java or xml. Joey deVilla obviously likes the meme too () could not decide on what and incidently quoted Tobi's question alongside two other links of which:

Martin Fowler says that 'Java is ..'. Travis Grigg's says that 'XML is ...'.

Both heard Brian's talk at OOPSLA2005 and quote him, so one quote must be wrong.

It was 3 years ago (after I had met him personally and heard him say) that I quoted Brian here and here. The later quote still seems to be numero duo in Pagerank, not because of Brian's genial meme but because of the extremley clever trick of quoting him inside a bluff story on X#. There I too say that 'XML is Diet Cobol'.

Mariann Unterluggauer quoted Brian on 14.05.2002. She says it sounded nice but she didn't quite get what it meant that 'xml was diet cobol'. In a comment on langreiter.com 624 days ago I quoted Brian's meme in a way that I said it were under your desktop and with transformations which is only a weak indication that I thought it was XML.

Next thing, Tobi requoted deVilla because of this nice little free grafic, i suppose. I am pretty sure that Travis Grigg quotes Brian correctly: "One of the funny quotes I heard Brian say in his presentation last night: "XSLT is kind of like lisp... but with horns." He also referred to XML as Diet Cobol.".

A Google Search on Dec. 22 2005 13:45 turns out 'ungefähr 131' occurences. A click to the second page strangly reduces this figure to 'ungefähr 68' and kills the rest of the pagelinks.

With haboglabloggin' on top and tinyville in second place one could firstly say that p3k is the waxing and slauti is the waning prophet of the great Brian's dietary meme and secondly guess that Brian uses the meme in his speaking and not in his writing, because he is not in the ranking top, but:

Is Google doing geolocation weighting in Pagerank? My impression they do is getting ever stronger. It gives you the feeling of having meaning on the web, which might be a large part of their business model, meaning the model of creating the values they are paid for.

If it were not so then until OOPSLA 2005 Brian would have landed his meme with Marianne and me and maybe lots of other people who either: do not write on the web did not understand the meme or have any other reason to not spread it which I do absolutely know nothing about.

Funny then also that Tobi's question and Brians OOPSLA talk met in the spatial and temporal domain.

However that be: We here at tiny keep endorsing this meme and are also extremely happy about the 'lisp with horns' meme. Pattern research in the funny style rulez.

PS: Beware of it-no.info, it's got spyware.

... plink