Comments on: Yak shaving

By: reddragdiva

reddragdiva — Wed, 23 Nov 2005 22:07:35 +0000

I’d originally thought TeX was the winner, then someone on a mailing list pointed out the Space War game.

By: Rich

Rich — Wed, 23 Nov 2005 20:44:39 +0000

Having said that, while looking for an unrelated post, I came across this post from Reddragdiva which mentions the canonical instance of yak shaving.

By: pegs

pegs — Wed, 23 Nov 2005 20:10:57 +0000

Yak shaving... I love it. Another favorite is percussive maintenance.

By: Rich

Rich — Wed, 23 Nov 2005 19:41:50 +0000

I didn’t quite get that either, but the alternative was to point to the Jargon File.

By: citizenx

citizenx — Wed, 23 Nov 2005 19:28:58 +0000

Some of the other explanations I’ve seen focus on a positive kind of yak shaving, the way fixing one item can lead you to redoing all sorts of other stuff. It’s extra work, but everything is better for it in the end. That’s the sort of thing I do at work quite a bit, trying to fix a problem in one line of code that leads be to rewrite half a module, but for the BETTER.

What’s up with the example given at the top of the page, though? Finding the gas discount card involves finding your keys? Don’t you need your keys anyway? How do you expect to drive without them?