1. APIs
At dinner someone asked Marie-Claire, a long-time friend of Ben’s, what she is doing at work.
She studied economics in school, but now she writes software for GE. They wanted to know what she is building. So she talked about front-end and back-end and how she writes in Java building APIs — at which point she quickly turned to look at me.
I smiled a wide smile and nodded.
“APIs?” somebody asked.
But soon the conversation had drifted off in another direction, and that brief moment of tech talk was over.
2. Trucks
“Ben would like programming,” Marie-Claire said as we sat in the living room.
“I tried,” I said, “a long time ago. But one day I sat down with him and showed him some Java. I don’t remember what it was about, let’s stay trucks. I showed him some code that rightly offended his sensibilities. It was something like “truck truck equals new truck”.
Truck truck = new Truck();
Marie-Claire exploded in laughter. Ben and Trudy looked at each other wondering what was so funny. She tried to explain, mumbling a bit about instantiating objects, but it was to no avail.
In any event, soon the conversation had drifted off in another direction, and the second brief moment of tech talk was over.