Frankly this is a pastime of mine. Whenever anything even vaguely mysterious comes up in the news I make up conspiracy theories to tell my wife and laugh about, always leaving it slightly vague how serious I might be, just to keep her on her toes. :)
The Wikipedia entry on First Normal Form also uses this kind of construction, which I suspect means it was written by the same person.
I have never seen terms like domain and attribute used as if they were plurals (the way "data" is), but even were that correct, "a domain have" would be contradictory, so I think it is just a linguistic quirk of the writer.
I once wrote in a comment in an Emacs Lisp todo list program that "Of all forms of time-wasting, writing time-management software is most sublime."
I would say that of all forms of procrastinating writing that novel, writing novel-writing software is most sublime. That, or maybe taking a "research trip" to Tibet or something.
I really like pkgsrc. I'm not really qualified to give a technical justification for it. It just had the right simple, clean feel to it, which NetBSD in general has. I would even go so far as to say that it was fun to use.
I consequently once spent quite some time trying to get it working under Cygwin so I could use it at work, but never got past problems with Cygwin group names that have spaces in them. It was too complex for me to fix....
Not sure. I'd argue that "refactoring" (also by its name) is less about eliminating duplication but rather about restructuring in general. Sure, in many (most?) cases you introduce new abstractions into code that was written before those abstractions could be clearly identified. But in my understanding it is just as much about replacing or (rarely) removing abstractions. When I see a commit that says "refactored X" I certainly don't assume there is only code deduplication in it.
