The hunting of elephants has a long history. Over the years, a large number of techniques of varying efficacy have been developed. This monograph describes several of these techniques.
Mathematicians hunt elephants by going to Africa, throwing out everything that is not an elephant, and catching one of whatever is left. Experienced mathematicians will attempt to prove the existence of at least one unique elephant before proceeding to step 1 as a subordinate exercise. Professors of mathematics will prove the existence of at least one unique elephant and then leave the detection and capture of an actual elephant as an exercise for their graduate students.
Computer Scientists hunt elephants by exercising Algorithm A:
1. Go to Africa.
2. Start at the Cape of Good Hope.
3. Work northward in an orderly manner, traversing the continent alternately east and west.
4. During each traverse pass,
a. Catch each animal seen.
b. Compare each animal caught to a reference elephant. A reference elephant may be obtained by executing algorithm A.
c. Stop when a match is detected.
Experienced Computer Programmers buy a reference elephant to correct the infinite recursion in step 4b. They also modify Algorithm A by placing a reference elephant in Cairo to ensure that the algorithm will terminate. Assembly language programmers prefer to execute Algorithm A on their hands and knees. K&R C programmers can't get Algorithm A to work because they wrote a function that implements step 4 but are calling it with a short instead of a long.
Engineers hunt elephants by going to Africa, catching gray animals at random, and stopping when any one of them weighs within plus or minus15 percent of any previously observed elephant.
Economists don't hunt elephants, but they believe that if elephants are paid enough, they will hunt themselves.
Statisticians hunt the 1st animal they see N times & call it an elephant.
Progress Programmers just include elephant.i.
Consultants don't hunt elephants, and many have never hunted anything at all, but they can be hired by the hour to advise those people who do. Operations research consultants can also measure the correlation of hat size and bullet color to the efficiency of elephant-hunting strategies, if someone else will only identify the elephants. Management consultants don't care how you hunt elephants. They just want you to pay them big bucks to tell you how to re-engineer your current process.
Politicians don't hunt elephants, but they will share the elephants you catch with the people who voted for them.
Lawyers don't hunt elephants, but they do follow the herds around arguing about who owns the droppings. Software lawyers will claim that they own all elephants, based on the look and feel of one dropping.
Unix Gurus hunt elephants with "cat animals | grep elephants | head 1". Anybody got any pizza?
Senior Managers set broad elephant-hunting policy based on the assumption that elephants are just like field mice, but with deeper voices.
The Engine Crew does not hunt elephants but the next release will include a feature that allows you to do it on-line and remotely by executing a stored procedure from within a Java-capable Web browser. Elephant hunting operations are transactional and fully recoverable.
Quality Assurance inspectors ignore the elephants and look for mistakes the other hunters made when they were packing the jeep.
Java Programmers just subclass someone else's elephant.
Vice Presidents of engineering, research, and development try hard to hunt elephants, but their staffs are designed to prevent it. When the vice president does get to hunt elephants, the staff will try to ensure that all possible elephants are completely prehunted before the vice president sees them. If the vice president does see a nonprehunted elephant, the staff will (1) compliment the vice president's keen eyesight and (2) enlarge itself to prevent any recurrence.
Windows Users try to hunt elephants but each time they try, some .dll they never heard of is missing.
Salespeople don't hunt elephants but spend their time selling elephants they haven't caught, for delivery two days before the season opens.
Software Salespeople ship the first thing they catch and write up an invoice for an elephant.
Hardware Salespeople catch rabbits, paint them gray, and sell them as DESKTOP ELEPHANTS.
PEG Members would like to hunt elephants but they cannot agree on the best approach. Should they use the UIB or straight 4gl? SmartObjects ? ActiveX ?
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