It Works—It Doesn't Work

Many people want to understand things at an abstract level, i.e. they want to be protected against having to know too much. To some extent, this is sane and reasonable. We want to ignore certain things in order to be able to focus on others.

There is however a danger in assuming that anything can be usefully processed, or even mentioned at a high level, so that communications may be avoided. One common pattern of high level understanding of arbitrary functionality is the pair: it works / it doesn't work.

One should notice that this is in fact not a pair at all!

It doesn't work implies an expectation which is not met. This requires an event, the breakdown (which may still be reproducible or not), as well as an observer, taking responsibility of her expectations.

It works is often in no way the logical opposite of the latter: it may be that there was no expectation, or that the expectations were wrong. The referent of it is then more fuzzy: there can be no object without a subject.

-- MarcGirod - 06 Sep 2007