Bike Shed

The term appears to have originated in the FreeBSD community, and now stands for any topic which causes heat out of all proportion to its importance.

Explanation from FreeBSD FAQ:

http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/faq/misc.html#BIKESHED-PAINTING

For the original post, see:

http://gray.bikeshed.com

Too dull, maybe?

http://beige.bikeshed.com

Don't like beige?

http://silver.bikeshed.com

etc. ad nauseam.

WadlersLaw is the corollary for ProgrammingLanguage design.

A bike shed is a shed that contains bikes (obviously).

What's a "bike"? What's a "shed"? In what sense do you mean "contain"? What do you call an empty "bike shed"?

What do you mean by "mean", "sense", and "empty"? I've no idea, but then I'm not setting out to define the terms :)

Its colour is of no importance whatsoever and therefore is guaranteed to cause enormous FlameWars whenever the subject is brought up.

Personally, I prefer to use database tables to store my bikes in. They just map more naturally to my mental processes. I demand seven concrete reasons why you use a shed instead of a database table.

With apologies to the intended butt of the joke... Whoever wrote the above owes me new morning tea, and came close to owing me a keyboard.

Huh...I was hoping to find some discussion of people's bike sheds. Mine is prefab plastic and holds five bicycles, old aluminum automobile wheels, a couple old dot matrix printers, some various electronics, and stuff for my rocket club. Did I mention that I am a packrat as well as a geek? The more accurate term is 'pacratist'.

Well, welcome to wiki, where sheds are made of tables, reasons are made of concrete and assuming meaningful meaning means you don't understand what I meant.

CategoryProject