Hammer Principle
February 13, 2012 3:06 PM Subscribe
Hammer Principle
Hammer Principle is a site a friend and I created a while back for comparison of different programming languages along different axes. It's since expanded into a variety of other areas, including databases, martial arts and gin (the gin one is sadly very unloved).
The basic idea is simple. You list what you know, and then it feeds you a set of different statements such as this martial art is good for defending yourself or this would be a good language for teaching children to write software. From users rankings it builds up interesting aggregate pictures of the different things being ranked. You can get descriptions of individual things or compare two items to see how they differ.
It's a surprising amount of fun to use - people seem to like the actual process of ranking things, and despite our best efforts to kill it with neglect it acquired a steady following. Eventually we had to throw up our hands and give in to success, and we're back working on the project and rather enjoying doing so again. As a result it will be likely changing a lot in the near future as we figure out ways to improve it and cool new features to add (in particular I'd like users to be able to add their own categories to the site, though there's a reasonable amount of work required before that's possible)
Hammer Principle is a site a friend and I created a while back for comparison of different programming languages along different axes. It's since expanded into a variety of other areas, including databases, martial arts and gin (the gin one is sadly very unloved).
The basic idea is simple. You list what you know, and then it feeds you a set of different statements such as this martial art is good for defending yourself or this would be a good language for teaching children to write software. From users rankings it builds up interesting aggregate pictures of the different things being ranked. You can get descriptions of individual things or compare two items to see how they differ.
It's a surprising amount of fun to use - people seem to like the actual process of ranking things, and despite our best efforts to kill it with neglect it acquired a steady following. Eventually we had to throw up our hands and give in to success, and we're back working on the project and rather enjoying doing so again. As a result it will be likely changing a lot in the near future as we figure out ways to improve it and cool new features to add (in particular I'd like users to be able to add their own categories to the site, though there's a reasonable amount of work required before that's possible)
Role: programmer and original idea
Maybe it doesn't fit certain definitions of database, and maybe it's not a very good database, but it's widely used as one.
posted by jsturgill at 8:22 AM on February 16, 2012
posted by jsturgill at 8:22 AM on February 16, 2012
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It's a bit of a specialised one, and using it for most things you would normally use a database for is ill adviced, but it's still a DB.
posted by DRMacIver at 10:57 PM on February 14, 2012