Unutterably Silly Add/Read a good joke to lighten your day

[PoP]

Originally Posted by steven522

Shouldn't that be "Real quality assurance testers"?

Debatable. Only QA guys can come up with that ...but then leave it for the programmer to swallow.

[HomeInMyShoes]

Originally Posted by IanD

"Besides, the determined Real Programmer can write FORTRAN programs in any language"

From the original:

"Real Programmers Don't Use PASCAL"

Note: this will mean nothing to you unless you are:
a) A programmer
b) Over 40 (at least!)
But ... if you qualify ... and I do ... it's chuffin' hilarious.

Sadly, I qualify. And yes, it was funny.

[Freeshadow]

Sadly I don't. My limits are to know where to laugh when reading Cooks Wizards Bane and the follow ups.

[alansplace]

[badgoodDeb]

Originally Posted by alansplace

Ah yes, sighed the backup manager. Who also resonated with the Fortran paper above!

[wodin]

Only quiche eaters do backups, real programers have it all memorized!

[yvanleterrible]

Who the hell is Pascal Fortran?

[pilotbob]

Originally Posted by yvanleterrible

Who the hell is Pascal Fortran?

If you can't c it you might be eaten by a python. I'd pay a ruby to watch though.

[Almamida]

Basic things

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by PoP

self referential joke only surpassed by:

An Irishman walks past a bar.

An old Irish guy walks into a bar. He finds a stool and raps on the bar top to get the bartender's attention

"Barkeep! Three pints of Guinness, please!"

The barkeep pulls his pints, he pays for them, and drinks them down, one after the other, then leaves. The next day he's back at the same time. "Barkeep! Three pints of Guinness, please!"

This goes on for several weeks, and the bartender is curious. The next time the old guy comes in, as he's pulling the pints, he asks "What's your name, laddie?"

"Me name's Sean."

"Good to meet you, Sean!", says the barkeep, shaking Sean's hand. "I'm Paddy."

"Sean, lad", says the bartender, "I'm curious. Every day for weeks you've been coming to me bar at the same hour every day and having exactly three pints of Guinness. What's going on, laddie?"

"Well, Paddy", says Sean, "when I was a young lad, I had two good friends. Every day we'd go to the local at this hour and hoist a pint together. They're gone now, the good lord rest their souls, so I honors their memory by having their pints for them!"

"Ah, its a good thing you do, Sean!" says Paddy.

A couple of more weeks pass, and one day Sean walks in. "Paddy! Two pints of Guinness, please!"

Paddy turns in shock. "Sean, lad! Every day for weeks you've been having three pints of Guinness, and today you only want two! What happened, laddie?"

"Oh, Paddy! The doctor told me to quit drinking!"
______
Dennis

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

An old Irish guy walks into a bar. He finds a stool and raps on the bar top to get the bartender's attention

Here, here and here!

But it is a good one.

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by IanD

"Besides, the determined Real Programmer can write FORTRAN programs in any language"

From the original:

"Real Programmers Don't Use PASCAL"

Note: this will mean nothing to you unless you are:
a) A programmer
b) Over 40 (at least!)
But ... if you qualify ... and I do ... it's chuffin' hilarious.

I qualify.

No, your Real Programmer uses OS\370. A good programmer can find and understand the description of the IJK305I error he just got in his JCL manual. A great programmer can write JCL without referring to the manual at all.

At the bank I once worked for, JCL was a black art. The COBOL programmers all used someone else's canned procs on their jobs, and wouldn't go near writing their own. Eight statements in the language, but terra incognita to all. (I once got an indignant phone call from the Applications Programming VP because I modified the JCL on one of my jobs to run it at a higher priority. I wasn't actually one of the programmers, or even on the DP staff. I don't know whether he was more perturbed by the fact it had been done or the someone who wasn't a DP staffer did it.

And IBM manuals were their own wonderland. IBM systems were thoroughly documented, and the documentation was accurate, but first you had to understand it. They were written in IBMspeak, and when you got an an error message, the manual often pointed you at another manual you didn't have, no matter how many you accumulated. (I have never seen a complete set of IBM 370 manuals.)

VSAM errors. Arghhh!

No, the Real Programmer wants a `you asked for it, you got it' text editor -- complicated, cryptic, powerful, unforgiving, dangerous. TECO, to be precise.

It has been observed that a TECO command sequence more closely resembles transmission line noise than readable text [4]. One of the more entertaining games to play with TECO is to type your name in as a command line and try to guess what it does. Just about any possible typing error while talking with TECO will probably destroy your program, or even worse -- introduce subtle and mysterious bugs in a once working subroutine.

I first encountered TECO at the above mentioned bank, on the DEC minis. (TECO was DEC specific. It did not run on IBM systems.) It's considered an example of a "write only" language. The original version of the Emacs editor written by Richard M. Stallman was in TECO. TECO was installed on the DEC machine used at the MIT AI Lab where Stallman worked, and various folks had written TECO macro packages to ease using it. Stallman and Guy Steele (mostly Stallman), collected and merged the packages and gave them a consistent interface. The result was Editing MACroS, or emacs, and rapidly became the standard editor at the labs. Stallman realized how successful his efforts had been when he no longer recalled how to do things in raw TECO.

When TECO went away, Stallman rewrote Emacs in LISP, and the current Gnu Emacs flavor is essentially a Lisp interpreter, with most of the editor written in the version of Lisp it interprets. If you know Emacs Lisp, you can get it to do almost anything, and people have. Old timers working on Unix systems would run Emacs when they sat down at the terminal, and do everything from within it.

You can still get TECO for the PC, and there are versions that run under Windows, Linux, and Mac OS/X. See http://almy.us/teco.html

The typical Real Programmer lives in front of a computer terminal.
Surrounding this terminal are:

o Listings of all programs the Real Programmer has ever worked on, piled in roughly chronological order on every flat surface in the office.

There was a eulogy on line for a legendary analog systems designer who worked for National Semiconductor. His office was like that. His filing system was by date and time, and he could pick the appropriate stack and know how far down in the pile the particular document was. He could find things very quickly. Fortunately, no one else ever had to locate a document in his office.
______
Dennis

[IanD]

Great stories, thanks ... which reminds me of my other favourite line from that text:

"When it comes time to fix a program like this, no manager would even think of
sending anything less than a Real Programmer to do the job -- no Quiche
Eating structured programmer would even know where to start. This is
called 'job security'."

Me, I started in my bedroom when I was a kid on a TR(a)S(h)-80, learned assembler for DEC-10s and PDP-11s as well as PASCAL and FORTRAN (natch) at university, RTL/2 at my first proper job. Finally, like everybody else, taught myself C and never looked back. I am now a confirmed quiche-eater and find myself wondering however people managed to produce anything useful back then, moon-landings notwithstanding. Then again, if the height of modern technological development is Twitter and Facebook, then maybe there's something to be said for the old ways .

[HomeInMyShoes]

Originally Posted by IanD

... Then again, if the height of modern technological development is Twitter and Facebook, then maybe there's something to be said for the old ways .

Height of social development yes, technological development no.

[Cyberman tM]

Originally Posted by IanD

Me, I started in my bedroom when I was a kid on a TR(a)S(h)-80, learned assembler for DEC-10s and PDP-11s as well as PASCAL and FORTRAN (natch) at university, RTL/2 at my first proper job.

RTL2 - So all you did was watch TV?



(And not even good TV...)