Single Minded

Now that there's a bit more than a week of Letterman, the media waxes poetic, mostly, on his riding into the sunset. One such came today, and includes this from Jimmy Kimmel:

"People are just plucking your greatest hits, without having to sit through the rest of the show. There's more focus on singles than on albums".

One might wonder whether this lack of attention span exists beyond the world of late night TV? Of course it does. A bunch of never-normalized files (called tables when put in a DB engine) is quite the same: a bunch of random singles stuffed together as the coder's personal playlist. Getting it all to work, eventually if at all, requires iterating through the debugger with a bit of agility. That the album which results is incoherent and unsustainable doesn't matter to the coder as he (still not enough shes to worry about) has moved on to making yet another playlist.