It’s not like our blog is the buzz blog everybody is talking about yet - after all it hasn’t been running more than a few days. But imagine my disappointment when I discovered that our little blog, which made absolutely no harm to anyone, all of a sudden had disappeared from the face of the blogosphere.

Oh my my, to the battle stations… We tried loading static HTML-pages, looked through the php code, checked the database (I even made a manual back up), downloaded and uploaded casual files, altered the htaccess file and did all sorts of silly stuff, but we just couldn’t find the problem.

After several hours it turned out that someone - I will not mention any name, but let’s just say that I recently called him “my brilliant team member” - forgot a comma in a plug in we are using for the web site.

So that’s what it takes to make a site and its administration tools crash completely:
A single comma.

While I do not know so much about programming, I do know a thing or two about the structure of human languages.

For instance most kids in high schools in Denmark are taught that

1. if you do not know when to use a comma, don’t use them at all
2. if you know how to use a comma without disturbing the meaning of the sentence, do that

Eventually the students who master this can dwell into books for years, get actual knowledge about the syntax of Danish and maybe one fine morning claim to understand the rules at hand.

The rules of when and how to use commas in Danish have been the object of much debate and actually we’ve had quite a few competing systems over the years: grammatical, pausing (put out of use in 1996) and unified/new.

Grammatical and unified were combined into one comma in 2003 and thereby obfuscating matters even more.

My estimate is that less than 50 persons in Denmark can write a post the length of a standard page without making at least one error - and just to be clear: I’m not one of them, even though I graduated from the faculty of humanities and my parents have been teaching high school students Danish grammar since I was born.

No matter how serious these errors would be, they wouldn’t make the page or the entire book (including cover and ISBN) disappear!

We can get dual core 64-bit wireless laptops that run eight hours on batteries, but do we get even the faintest hint that our software isn’t working? No. Come on, we must do better than that!