I was expounding on my dislike of the routine questions being asked of Wesley Clark last night (see previous post) to a colleague from Math, who suggested "Which do you prefer, C or Fortran? And if you use Fortran, do you declare all your variables?" as an alternative to boring policy questions that produce nothing but rehearsed answers. Clearly, this is a niche that needs to be explored, thus today's Dorky Poll:
What great geek controversy should Presidential candidates be asked about?
Because, really, how could you consider voting for a man (or woman) without knowing his (or her) position on the C vs. Fortran question?
Other topics that come to mind are things like "String Theory or Loop Quantum Gravity?" and "Copenhagen Interpretation or Many-Worlds?," to say nothing of "Emacs vs. vi?"
So what geeky question would you like to see asked of Presidential aspirants?
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How about a controversial one: "Do you indent with tabs or spaces? And if spaces, how many?" ;)
"GPL, BSD licence or other?"
"Gnome or KDE?"
"What is the world's best text editor?"
"Underscores or camel case?"
"Which bracketing style is superior?"
"Is Linux ready for the desktop?"
"What is the best newbie distro?"
These are all *vitally* important issues which any world leader should contemplate daily.
~Do you support arbitrary precision in functional programming languages?
~What are your views on commenting your code?
~What software development process(es) do you support? Waterfall? Iterative? Agile?
~Cooler mascot: Tux or the GNU gnu?
~Have you ever programmed in Ruby? - I'm hoping for a Bill Clinton-esque answer, "Yes, but never on rails."
LaTeX for papers, or Word?
Seriously, though, patent reform is a really important geek topic that presidential contenders should be asked about.
Emacs, or vi?
Interaction Interpretation.
But I would agree that IP laws are something that are important to politicians and nerds.
Which edition of Dungeons and Dragons is your favourite?
What is your opinion on the merits of NULLs in databases?
Lubos Motl: Hero or Zero?
confluence at #2:
"What is the world's best text editor?"
All the other questions are really just implications of this.
I'd want to ask a biology question. RNases are everywhere and unavoidable, but I'd nonetheless like to ask a presidential candidate:
"What would you, as president, do to defend our country from the RNases that have infiltrated our borders?"
I'd be funny to see them all flustered.
The Novak already got the crucial one, damn him.
Overloading operators: Threat or Menace.
Probably the wrong kind of geeky but...
Who shot first? Han or Greedo?
Bayesian or frequentist?
Kirk or Picard?
Do Balrogs have wings?
"Do you support the use of Forth under any circumstances?"
Are branes only in the brain?
Hidden variables or not?
Is the hungarian naming convention evil?
Mac or PC?
Henry Tudor or Richard III?
d20 or GURPS?
Fighter, Thief, or Black Mage?
How do you prefer to neutralize alkali metals? (ie: do you cool the metal with an icebath and add propanol dropwise, or do you throw the stuff in a sink and watch the fireworks?)
The text editor question is really just akin to asking about religion; people can argue about it all they want, but no one is going to change any minds.
Reverse polish notation or...the normal way (whatever it's called).
Firefox or Internet Explorer? Seriously - that would tell us a lot about a candidate.
Basic, destroyer of youth?
Name all of the text editors you have used.
Can Lit Geeks play? How about this one: MLA or Chicago?
Coding in csh; considered harmful?
forward slash or backslash?
adam, don't you know 'csh' is an acronym for 'Csh is Surely Harmful' (disclaimer - I've been a regular user of BSD csh for most of the last 5 years. But NOT for coding.)
@#21 Asad:
You mean to ask
Postfix vs. Infix?
Aside: I cannot believe nobody mentioned evolution.
I'd probably ask how they dated their documents. YYYY-MM-DD or MM/DD/YY or what?