I'm afraid I wasn't communicating effectively. I have no problem with non-humorous technical material - the parent comment asked >How does the space reserved

I'm afraid I wasn't communicating effectively. I have no problem with non-humorous technical material - the parent comment asked >How does the space reserved for jellybean stains guide the reader towards the desired problem-solving approach? ... and I was suggesting that perhaps the authors were using the medium as the message - I find that being relaxed helps with debugging, typically.