joel's thoughts

So, I’m poking around Heather’s blog, following links to other folks’ sites, and Kevin tells me to:

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 23.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.

Okay, but this gets tricky. You see, the nearest book is O’Reilly’s vi Editor Pocket Reference. I turn to page 23, and am immediately faced with the question, “What constitutes a sentence?” Fully three-quarters of the page is the remainder of a table of program options, of which line 5 reads, “shell (sh) /bin/sh“. If, however, I go down to where there is actual prose, looking for the fifth sentence takes me to the next page and reads:

Each attribute is separated from the next by a tab character and consists of two colon-separated subfields.

So there you go. I thought I’d take another stab at it and grab the next-nearest, more actual-booklike book, which turned out to be the Perl Cookbook (O’Reilly again). It’s borrowed, as I’m only a Perl wizard wannabe, but it’s nearby nonetheless. The what’s-a-sentence question still comes up, though, but this time there’s a block of code in the way. Counting the previous three sentences, I get to line two of the code:

($var = <<HERE_TARGET) =~ s/^\s+//gm;

But if you take the entire code block as a ‘sentence’ (and one could make such an argument), then the fifth ‘sentence’ on the page is:

The substitution is straightforward

And there you have it.

Sheesh. I’m such a geek.