Thank you for holding my duck (2021)

Summary

There’s a story I like to tell, which I vaguely remembered as originating at Bell Labs or Xerox PARC. A researcher had a rubber duck in his office. When he found himself stumped on a problem, he would pick up the duck, walk over to a colleague, and ask them to hold the duck. He would proceed to explain the problem, often realizing the solution himself in the middle of the explanation. Then he would say, “Thank you for holding my duck”, and leave. I love this story. Years ago, Tamar Shinar and I agreed that the “Thank you for holding my duck” expression is better if it is understood to not mean the colleague didn’t contribute, as then it can be used in boundary cases without slight. But finally, someone asked for the source, and I looked for one and failed. I did find something, but it was worse than my version: Wikipedia’s page on Rubber duck debugging has a programmer explaining their problem to the duck. This may work, but misses the social aspect: explaining the problem to a person uses a different part of the speaker’s brain. I asked some people at Google; only Martin Wicke had heard of my version, and his source was me. I did learn from the inventor of the Burrows-Wheeler transform that rubber duck debugging is sometimes called “brickwalling” in the UK, but again that’s the worse version. Finally, with Tamar’s help I found my direct source: Bill Polson, back when we were both at Pixar. Pixar, then the mists of time Here is the story as far back as I can trace it. I got it from Bill Polson, who got it from Leo Hourvitz, who got it from a story about Xerox PARC. Leo, who worked at Apple and NeXT prior to Pixar, has “tried to search for an authoritative source many times, but any search involving PARC inevitably devolves into results about Steve and the Mac”. Bill’s words, slightly corrected by Leo: According to Leo, there was a duck at one point at PARC, and it was involved in some sort of protocol. Probably you had to be holding it to speak in a standup or somet...