{"id":8523,"date":"2012-01-17T07:00:00","date_gmt":"2012-01-17T07:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.msdn.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/2012\/01\/17\/microspeak-walls-and-ladders\/"},"modified":"2012-01-17T07:00:00","modified_gmt":"2012-01-17T07:00:00","slug":"microspeak-walls-and-ladders","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/20120117-00\/?p=8523","title":{"rendered":"Microspeak: Walls and ladders"},"content":{"rendered":"

Reader laonianren wanted to know more about this game Walls and Ladders<\/a>.\n “Walls and Ladders” is not a game. It’s just a metaphor for a conflict in which one side wants to perform some action and the other side wants to prevent it. The defending side builds a wall, and the attacking side builds a taller ladder<\/a>. In response, the defending side builds a taller wall, and the attacking side builds an even taller ladder. The result of this conflict is that the defending side constructs an ever-more-elaborate wall and the attacking side constructs a more-and-more complex ladder<\/a> [link possible NSFW], both sides expending ridiculous amounts of resources and ultimately ending up back where they started.\n There is a closely-related metaphor known as an arms race<\/a>. In an arms race, each participant wants to be the most X<\/i>, for some property X<\/i>. An arms race tends to be all-attack, whereas wall-and-ladders tends to have one side attacking and the other defending.\n Since many conflicts can be phrased either as an attack-attack scenario or an attack-defend scenario (some defenses may include counter-attacks), I tend to get the two confused. Notice, for example, that my arms race<\/a> article contains mostly walls-and-ladders scenarios; for example, a case where one side wants to terminate a process and another wants to prevent it from being terminated. On the other hand, my wall and ladders<\/a> example was really more of an arms race, with both sides wanting to take control of the screen.<\/p>\n

Depending on which group you work with at Microsoft, you may find a preference for walls and ladders<\/i> over arms race<\/i>, probably due to the same sensitivity to military terms that led to the War Room<\/i> being renamed Ship Room<\/i><\/a>. (I seem to recall that there was a lawsuit that among other things alleged that the fact that a Microsoft project called its daily meeting room the War Room<\/i> was proof of Microsoft’s evil essence<\/a>.) <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Reader laonianren wanted to know more about this game Walls and Ladders. “Walls and Ladders” is not a game. It’s just a metaphor for a conflict in which one side wants to perform some action and the other side wants to prevent it. The defending side builds a wall, and the attacking side builds a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1069,"featured_media":111744,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[105,103],"class_list":["post-8523","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-oldnewthing","tag-microspeak","tag-non-computer"],"acf":[],"blog_post_summary":"

Reader laonianren wanted to know more about this game Walls and Ladders. “Walls and Ladders” is not a game. It’s just a metaphor for a conflict in which one side wants to perform some action and the other side wants to prevent it. The defending side builds a wall, and the attacking side builds a […]<\/p>\n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8523","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1069"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8523"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8523\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/111744"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8523"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8523"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8523"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}