Eierlegende Wollmilchsau (2011) | Hacker News Reader

Eierlegende Wollmilchsau (2011)

germanyinusa.com

69 pointsTomte35 comments

"Eierlegende Wollmilchsau" doesn't really have the positive connotation of an "unachievable ideal", but instead that it is a dumb idea in the first place trying to cram too many features into a product.

Well it has a certain kind of utopian ring to it. But my guess (as a German native speaker) would be that if you were to ask ten Germans whether the word was meant positive, negative or neutral, the needle would not swing as decisively into negative direction as some here claim.

It is very typical for example to read: "Die Eierlegende Wollmilchsau!" as the title line of a clearly positive review of some sort of technological product sold online. I have never once seen it used in a negative way in such a review, even though it certainly has the aforementioned "wet dream" aspect to it.

To expand on that, I'd say it's a thing that does everything and depending on context, that's a good thing because the compromises and the intended use work out (e.g. Swiss army knives) or a bad thing because they result in a product that sucks at everything (e.g. Jira).

To me this also misses the point. An eierlegende Wollmilchsau in my book represents a non-existent solution to every single problem in a context (or at least too many problems) at the same time. The whole point is that there is no such animal, and this should indirectly indicate that the author thinks this sought solution does not exist – not that it just has not been found yet but that such a solution is impossible, maybe even absurd.

This. I wonder how this site can get it so wrong and I hope this wrong interpretation doesn't spread. As a native German speaker, "Eierlegende Wollmilchsau" has a clear negative connotation, not a positive one, and means feature bloat.

"This site" is the blog of the German Embassy in Washington. They know what the word means, even if they might have given insufficient emphasis to the negative connotation.

Meanwhile perhaps they don't realize what "wet dream" means in English.

I guess they do. After all, in German it's the same phrase

I don't see the negative connotation in "Eierlegende Wollmilchsau". It's more a "It has so many features and is the nonplusultra so it just can't be real"

Maybe it is understood differently depending on the part of germany you're from.

I suspect the divide is more between product managers and developers ;)

Fun fact: A Scrum poker set that's commonly used in Germany uses it as an image corresponding to "infinity" in terms of story points or hours.

It also has a question mark with a train station on it, since "I just understand only train station" means "I have no clue what you're talking about".

The first thing that came to mind was The Homer: https://simpsons.fandom.com/wiki/The_Homer

That's probably more of a Fliewatüüt: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robbi,_Tobbi_und_das_Fliewat...

There's some awesome pictures of this beast around if you do an image search. I wonder what AI art prompts would dream up?

It's a common insult in engineering to mean "feature creep". As software, for me it's those web "Portals" (filled with images of grinning beautiful people holding laptops) that universities or giant organisations build to pull together everything, HR, payroll, phone-book, marketing, the CEO's blog... all into one unholy dysfunctional tangle that prevents you from finding anything (and expose the org to much higher cyber-risk).

Closer to home, isn't that just what the "smartphone" is? A single point of omnifunctional convergence that, if it dies, leaves you cold and hungry? I'd rather have a whole farmyard of squawking and squealing any day.

Sounds a bit like the Shmoo, of Shmoocon fame.

> Are you familiar with The Shmoo, Mr. Fisher? Comic strip I liked as a boy. The Shmoo was a loveable creature, really. Laid eggs, gave milk... ...and died of sheer ecstasy when looked at with hunger. The Shmoo loved to be eaten. It could taste like any food you desire. Shmoo hide cut thin made fine leather. Even Shmoo whiskers made excellent toothpicks.

> In essence, The Shmoo supplied all of the world's wants. I only bring up the case of The Shmoo because of its relevance to you and the reason you were brought here.

(via Lucky Number Slevin, which is a vastly underrated movie IMO)

Occasionally this is also encountered as an acronym. Some colleagues of mine christened an ASIC whose requirements kept growing EWOMIS: http://asic.ethz.ch/1991/Ewomis.html

And I suspect it's not a coincidence that there is a German company named EWOMIS as well: http://ewomis.com

Eclipse Installer lists a product with the same name; it installs a "kitchen sink" version of the IDE, mostly as an academic exercise to demonstrate the installer's capabilities and see how well components come along: https://www.eclipse.org/lists/cross-project-issues-dev/msg12...

A new name for the 10x developer.

Not at all. It was originally referring to C++ ("Sorry, cannot say no”), then to the design by committee of Perl6, now renamed to Raku, the Japanese translation of "Eierlegende Wollmilchsau". https://imgur.io/xtddi16

Please Reini, stop being funny like this. It does not become you.

To everybody else: if you would like to see what the Raku Programming Language is about, check out an introduction https://raku.guide , or check out the weekly blog https://rakudoweekly.blog

Not at all.

> The Eierlegende Wollmilchsau is a single tool or a person that attempts to do the work of many, like a jack of all trades or the literal egg-laying wool-milk-sow. Needless to say, finding such a versatile tool or person is almost as hard as finding the mythical creature.

You say this description doesn't come close?

It doesn't really carry the mainly negative meaning of the word. E.g. trying to do too many things, but everything is half-assed.

Is "sow" really a word for pig? Or did they just want something that sounds like the German "Sau"?

Also, when print-scan-copy-all-in-one devices were a new thing, I liked to call them Eierlegende Wollmilchsau. Any other devices that come to mind?

A sow is a female pig. It has exactly the same meaning as "Sau" in German, and even sounds the same. "Pig" is "Schwein" in German.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pig

And Schwein is probably where the word swine comes from.

It’s quite a cromulent word for a female pig.

Is "pork"? There's a layer of English that has decidedly Germanic origins; see also "legal doublets".

porc is french, generally english meat animals turn french when you kill them to eat them - no joke.

we were told in class that the meat is called what the nobility called it and the nobility spoke french

BTW, this came up on Daring Fireball recently regarding Elon Musk's "X" app...

https://daringfireball.net/linked/2022/10/07/eierlegende-wol...

So essentially a Shmoo.

> Eierlegende Wollmilchsau

Funny,when I first read this, I thought they had found a new nickname for their government.

Nah, the eierlegende Wollmilchsau is good for everything, but unattainable. Our government is good for nothing, but we can't get rid of it. So ... it's the exact opposite.

That would,imply outcomes on all dimensions....

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