A book by DouglasAdams; the fifth member of the HitchhikersGuideToTheGalaxy trilogy(!), and the first to contain all new material (the first three books were based heavily on the radio series).

The title comes from the original radio series.  In ''The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy'', the original entry in the guide for PlanetEarth is ''harmless''.  Ford Prefect was a researcher for the guide who meant to visit Earth for 2 weeks and got stuck for 15 years.  During this time he wrote a huge and magnificent entry for planet Earth, which after some editing by his superiors was rendered in the next edition of the book as ''mostly harmless''.

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Adams' WholeSortOfGeneralMishMash is the most significant event to hit OO modeling since the HuntingOfTheSnark (see PoemsAboutMethodology).

Totally turned a bit of idle beer discussion into a serious ontology and modeling paradigm.

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Yup.  It permits me to write stuff like "''(Actually everything'' '''is'''
''an object.  But that does not mean that everything'' '''must be''' ''an object.  A little ontology check.)''" (from TaxoMania), and mean it. --
AlistairCockburn