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Comment by flohofwoe | Hacker News Reader

"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.

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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...

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