When looking for research to join, find papers you wish you'd written.
Very Short Stories. via hanging fire.
In no particular order...
If Papa Hemingway really thought this was his best work, I agree with him.
I'm unimpressed by the presentation of this on the website - the way the article is forced to break around the toolbox is clumsy.
The stories themselves... feh. Most are instead playing a game of "Look at me. Me. I'm clever." A few of these are quite suitable as opening hooks, but don't hold up as stories. Or as telegrams "Luca Brasi sleeps with the fishes".
Atwood's I think was pretty good; hey, she got in some character development. But I don't agree that the verb tenses work.
Six words does not leave a lot of space to fit in the Cambellian archetypes. Or for Ned's wife to underline.
Comes courtesy of Excel, which was proposed as a model for the "correct" behavior of software I'm currently delivering.
Open a new Spreadsheet in Excel, and set the value of the cell A1 to
=MIN()
Min is a function that requires one or more arguments, and Excel even reminds you of this once it recognizes that you are intending to call min. But for this exercise, we are testing the behavior of excel when there is an invalid formula in the spreadsheet edit control.
First test: Attempt to save the document. You get an error message: the formula you typed contains an error. Yup, it does. Bravo, have a biscuit.
Second test: Attempt to close Excel (File.Quit). Oops, you can't quit: the formula you typed contains an error. And then, just to rub it in, you get a second error message: Cannot quit Microsoft Office Excel. And this message is so important that it sits on the top level of the windows hierarchy; when you tab to another application, the error message sits in the foreground. So I can sit here merrily blogging with the message box sitting in front of my browser.
Third test: Attempt to close the spreadsheet, using the close button on the document window itself (x in the corner for the win). <fx: crickets> No error message at all, no behavior, not even a dial tone.