The 1000 Words

A nun found the scribe Qi in his study.

“I am puzzled by the comments you have written on my documentation,” said the nun, placing a thick sheaf of papers on the scribe’s desk.

“Ah, yes,” said Qi as he turned the pages, revealing hundreds of neatly-rendered sequence diagrams, each with a small note scrawled upon it in red ink. “You are the nun who graphically illustrates every possible circumstance in which a domain object is retrieved and displayed, regardless of how intuitive the case may seem.”

“I strive to be thorough,” said the nun.

“That is a great relief,” said the scribe. “If you were striving to be concise, I shudder to imagine what your thoroughness would do to the local tree population.”

The nun tapped her finger on the red scrawl at the bottom of one page. “Yet under each diagram you have written, this picture speaks 1000 words.”

“That number is in base two,” said the scribe.

The nun blinked. “Eight words?”

Qi nodded, dipping his brush in a pot of red ink. “The same eight, over and over: This nun owns a tool for generating UML.”