Nothing Really Matters

The Temple used a popular dependency-injection and transaction-management framework, yet always there were junior monks who needed to be schooled in its ways. One such junior monk had been tasked with creating a Service interface and its implementation class. The senior monk Wangohan was reviewing his code.

“You have placed a @Transactional annotation on a private method!” snapped Wangohan. “That will do nothing! The framework only looks for such annotations on the implementations of public interface methods!”

The junior monk replied calmly: “I observed no error.”

“Your class also has a non-transactional method call a transactional one directly!” continued Wangohan. “That too will do nothing! Transaction management is only performed by the implementation’s proxy, not the implementation itself!”

Again the junior monk replied calmly: “I observed no error.”

Wangohan went to see master Kaimu and told him what had transpired. “How can I work with such an idiot?” asked Wangohan. “He only believes there is an error if it leaps up and bites his eyeball.”

“Null,” said Kaimu. “The junior monk is no idiot. For what he said is true, and yet he means the opposite of what he said, which is also true. So he is twice correct, and concisely so.”

“Then master Kaimu must be two times too clever for me,” replied Wangohan. “For he clearly just said something, but what he said was nonsense, which is the opposite of saying something. Therefore let me depart before I become so wise that I surpass the junior monk.”

Wangohan bowed mockingly and went out.

Later that day, Kaimu found the junior monk and said to him, “There is a smoke alarm in Wangohan’s quarters. Disable it. Then tonight when he is sleeping, set his room on fire.”

“Surely Wangohan would find this objectionable,” said the junior monk.

Kaimu replied calmly: “He will observe no error.”