Geek Humour

[Fulvio]

Leaving things to the last minute as usual, I've been searching my backups for some paperwork for tomorrow's MICOM (Microcomputer Club of Melbourne) AGM. And of course, again as usual, I got sidetracked. This time into reading old club newsletters from the 90's.

Some of the stuff in there is hilarious. Well... mildly amusing to non-geeks I guess. So I figured since I'm screwed anyway (didn't find what I was looking for, so I'll have to make it up as I go along tomorrow *sigh*), I may as well share some with you lot. I promise not to dump it all here in one go though. I'll try and spread it out a bit.




Programming Language Choices

The proliferation of modern programming languages which seem to have stolen countless features from each other sometimes makes it difficult to remember which language you're using. This guide is offered as a public service to help programmers in such dilemmas.

C:
You shoot yourself in the foot.

Assembly:
You crash the OS and overwrite the root disk. The system administrator arrives and shoots you in the foot. After a moment of contemplation, the administrator shoots himself in the foot and then hops around the room rabidly shooting at everyone in sight.

APL:
You hear a gunshot, and there's a hole in your foot, but you don't remember enough linear algebra to understand what the hell happened.

C++:
You accidentally create a dozen instances of yourself and shoot them all in the foot. Providing emergency medical care is impossible since you can't tell which are bitwise copies and which are just pointing at others and saying, "That's me, over there."

Ada:
If you are dumb enough to actually use this language, the United States Department of Defense will kidnap you, stand you up in front of a firing squad, and tell the soldiers, "Shoot at his feet."

MODULA-2:
After realizing that you can't actually accomplish anything in the language, you shoot yourself in the head.

Pascal:
Same as Modula-2, except the bullets are the wrong type and won't pass through the barrel. The gun explodes.

sh, csh, etc:
You can't remember the syntax for anything, so you spend five hours reading man pages before giving up. You then shoot the computer and switch to C.

Smalltalk:
You spend so much time playing with the graphics and windowing system that your boss shoots you in the foot, takes away your workstation, and makes you develop in COBOL on a character terminal.

FORTRAN:
You shoot yourself in each toe, iteratively, until you run out of toes, then you read in the next foot and repeat. If you run out of bullets, you continue anyway because you have no exception-processing ability.

ALGOL:
You shoot yourself in the foot with a musket. The musket is esthetically fascinating, and the wound baffles the adolescent medic in the emergency room.

COBOL:
USING a COLT45 HANDGUN, AIM gun at LEG.FOOT, THEN place ARM.HAND.FINGER on HANDGUN.TRIGGER, and SQUEEZE. THEN return HANDGUN to HOLSTER. Check whether shoelace needs to be retied.

BASIC:
Shoot self in foot with water pistol. On big systems, continue until entire lower body is waterlogged.

PL/I:
You consume all available system resources, including all the offline bullets. The Data Processing and Payroll Department doubles its size, triples its budget, acquires four new mainframes, and drops the original one on your foot.

SNOBOL:
You grab your foot with your hand, then rewrite your hand to be a bullet. The act of shooting the original foot then changes your hand/bullet into yet another foot (a left foot).

LISP:
You shoot yourself in the appendage which holds the gun with which you shoot yourself in the appendage which holds the gun with which you shoot yourself in the appendage which holds the gun with which you shoot yourself in the appendage which holds...

SCHEME:
You shoot yourself in the appendage which holds the gun with which you shoot yourself in the appendage which holds the gun with which you shoot yourself in the appendage which holds the gun with which you shoot yourself in the appendage which holds... but none of the other appendages are aware of this happening.

English:
You put your foot in your mouth, then bite it off.

{Author Unknown}

[Unicorn]

Very good Fulvio ....... nice to see you having a "bash" at the last minute.
After a quick search ....

Software Operating Systems take over the Airline Industry.  This is an
analysis of the way things would be run...


UNIX Airways
Everyone brings one piece of the plane along when they come to the
airport.  They all go out on the runway and put the plane together piece by piece, arguing non-stop about what kind of plane they are supposed to be building.

Air DOS
Everybody pushes the airplane until it glides, then they jump on and let the plane coast until it hits the ground again.  Then they push again, jump on again, and so on ...

Mac Airlines
All the stewards, captains, baggage handlers, and ticket agents look and act exactly the same.  Every time you ask questions about details, you are gently but firmly told that you don't need to know, don't want to know, and everything will be done for you without your ever having to know, so just shut up.

Windows Air
The terminal is pretty and colorful, with friendly stewards, easy
baggage check and boarding, and a smooth take-off.  After about 10 minutes in the air, the plane explodes with no warning whatsoever.

Windows NT Air
Just like Windows Air, but costs more, uses much bigger planes, and
takes out all the other aircraft within a 40-mile radius when it explodes.

Linux Air
Disgruntled employees of all the other OS airlines decide to start their
own airline.  They build the planes, ticket counters, and pave the
runways themselves.  They charge a small fee to cover the cost of printing the ticket, but you can also download and print the ticket yourself.  When you board the plane, you are given a seat, four bolts, a wrench and a copy of the seat-HOWTO.html.  Once settled, the fully adjustable seat is very comfortable, the plan leaves and arrives on time without a single problem, the in-flight meal is wonderful.  You try to tell customers of the other airlines about the great trip, but all they can say is, "You had to do what with the seat?"

[Fulvio]

Very good Fulvio ....... nice to see you having a "bash" at the last minute.

I actually gave up searching, and I'm going to go with the "the dog ate my homework" approach, I think. Fortunately things are not as hectic as they were when we had 1800 members, so there's really not much to report. I'll just grab the financials from last year, which I have a paper copy of, and promise to rebuild the records in time for the report to the government. I might even get away with it, maybe.

[Mister T]

APL:

It was clearly written some time ago.

[triplewitch]

I programmed in APL in the late 60s/early 70s.  After I changed jobs I never heard of it again after that.

[Mister T]

I've never heard of it until a few months ago when someone told me they'd used it sometime in the 1980s (the only programming they ever did) and I was a little surprised to when I read about the notation.

[Fulvio]

There are plenty of "dead" languages out there. And maybe even more which are deeply embedded in critical legacy systems, that fewer and fewer people have any idea how to maintain. You might be surprised at just how much legacy stuff is still out there. It most definitely is not a Windows/OSX/Linux world, especially if you eliminate all the trivialities like us consumers. Important stuff doesn't look anything like what we use.

Sadly though, with everything being about money, nobody is training people to work with anything but the latest and greatest consumer toys. What happens when the last person capable of maintaining say a nuclear reactor drops dead and nobody takes his place? *shudder*

[markn]

My first real coding was done on a series of proprietary DEC and VAX scripting languages.  Those systems are still being used almost 20 years later.  I often wonder how they are being maintained.

Some of my products were written (10 years ago) in Visual Basic 6.  That language was EOL'd by MS a few years ago and yet they are forced to make Windows compatible with it because of the BILLIONS of lines of VB6 that are out there the real world that no-one wants to port to a newer language because it's too expensive and it still works.  

Programming languages, if successful, cannot ever be obsoleted for marketing reasons.

[Fulvio]

I often wonder how they are being maintained.

There are companies built on maintaining VAXen. One is DEC here in Melbourne (No, not the "real" DEC, but they do use the same logo, and a very similar name). I actually went up to Sydney for them and brought back a truckload of VAXes from an Optus data centre at Homebush. The trip was a blast, and as a bonus we even got paid handsomely for it (I would've done it for free, but don't tell them that...).

All these years after DEC's demise, there are still around 100,000 installations worldwide, and a very robust industry maintaining them. Its simply uneconomical to port everything to more recent machines.

I actually own a pair of VAXes myself.. an 11/750 and a MicroVAX, which are currently in storage. Waaaay too expensive to power up.

[Fulvio]