lex parsimoniae

Roman Wagon Wheels

It’s said that the gauge (width between tracks) of American railroads can be traced from bureaucracy to bureaucracy back to the width of Roman war chariots.  It turns out that this is just another urban legend, but if you’ve ever worked in an organization of any size, you’ve experienced the organizational inertia that makes this legend so plausible.

I ran into a great one today, for instance.  I’m doing some work in a place where I don’t get to set the standards (yes, it’s a government agency).  One of the real winners is a standard that mandates that all SQL queries for an application be stored in an XML file, with the queries and their corresponding parameters specified.