It's not generally my practice to propagate LJ memes in this diary just for the sake of saying something, but on the rare occasion when someone posts one which includes a question I actually find interesting, I don't let the fact that it came from an LJ meme stop me from answering it.

So naath posted a relationships questionnaire [friends-locked, but a public copy of the questions is here] recently, which contained a lot of questions which I don't feel like answering because they're (variously) inherently uninteresting, badly specified, oxymoronic or simply wouldn't elicit any particularly interesting answers from me; but in among them was the old chestnut ‘Do you believe in love at first sight?’, which reminded me that I relatively recently acquired a definite opinion on that question and it isn't as simple as a yes or a no.

( Half of it. )

Of course, as I mention above, other people's minds might turn out to work entirely differently from mine. But for the moment, that's my opinion.

As of this week I find myself maintaining code written by a C++ programmer in the Strict Orthodox style. This means that the program is divided rigidly into classes, even the parts that are entirely procedural in function; that there is a strict convention of one class to a source file even when this means separating fragments of code which are doing a semantically related job and would benefit from being near each other; and, in general, that classes and templates and namespaces and long multi-word names are used in a manner that suggests the author specifically wanted to avoid writing

    do_foo(arg1, arg2);

if he could possibly instead write

    FooDoingClass<inexplicableTemplateParameter>::getInstance()->
        doFoo(RandomNamespace::arg, RandomOtherNamespace::arg2);

only, for added annoyance, without the line break in the middle.