It's a reference to Brawndo marketing campaign, a sugary soda drink from the movie Idiocracy. The marketing campaign discouraged buyers from using water for drinking and irrigation which caused famine because the audience was not good at critical thinking but very susceptible to marketing tricks. Whenever there was a question of using water s.a. to water the crops, everyone would ask with disgust if they intend to use the same water that's used in the toilet.
This is the attitude I've encountered a lot when dealing with trends in technology. For example, there's hatred of XML suit of tools and formats. And it is so entrenched and especially more so with people who have a very superficial understanding of the subject, who also happen to be the majority of the target audience. Thus, every time when a project requires a simple to parse format with schema validation, powerful querying mechanisms, extensibility... while XMLs easily checks all those boxes, developers will tie themselves into knots only to avoid using it making all sorts of ridiculous claims about XML.
I'm not specifically advocating for the use of XML, and I believe there are better formats... unfortunately those would be an even harder sell :) I'm just using XML as an example of something that should've been a no-brainer for many trivial tasks, and yet it's been avoided like a plague for superficial reasons.
Oh, I see, thanks! I've watched Idiocracy but I guess I didn't make the connection. Good on you for avoiding spoilers also ;)
And that's a good point about entrenched opinions in tech. On the positive side, this kind of thing creates an imbalance that opens opportunities. For example, I managed to start a PhD in Inductive Logic Programming at a good university, when my academic record up to that point had been average, and I suspect that was mainly because I applied for research in an area where there are very few applications, namely Inductive Logic Programming: even now everyone's running the other way, towards deep learning :D
This is the attitude I've encountered a lot when dealing with trends in technology. For example, there's hatred of XML suit of tools and formats. And it is so entrenched and especially more so with people who have a very superficial understanding of the subject, who also happen to be the majority of the target audience. Thus, every time when a project requires a simple to parse format with schema validation, powerful querying mechanisms, extensibility... while XMLs easily checks all those boxes, developers will tie themselves into knots only to avoid using it making all sorts of ridiculous claims about XML.
I'm not specifically advocating for the use of XML, and I believe there are better formats... unfortunately those would be an even harder sell :) I'm just using XML as an example of something that should've been a no-brainer for many trivial tasks, and yet it's been avoided like a plague for superficial reasons.