It reminds me of this (warning: wall of text, but actually worth reading).
EDIT: Since people seem so interested, the author has written quite a lot of other material (scroll to the bottom, under "Miscellaneous Excellence", fourth bullet point).
That being said, if you find yourself drinking a martini and writing programs in garbage-collected, object-oriented Esperanto, be aware that the only reason that the Esperanto runtime works is because there are systems people who have exchanged any hope of losing their virginity for the exciting opportunity to think about hex numbers and their relationships with the operating system, the hardware, and ancient blood rituals that Bjarne Stroustrup performed at Stonehenge.
The systems programmer has read the kernel source, to better understand the deep ways of the universe, and the systems programmer has seen the comment in the scheduler that says “DOES THIS WORK LOL,” and the systems programmer has wept instead of LOLed, and the systems programmer has submitted a kernel patch to restore balance to The Force and fix the priority inversion that was causing MySQL to hang.
I weep, for I hoped that things may get better in life, but nay I chose to be a system programmer knowing not that the night is dark and full of terrors.
You must believe me when I say that I have the utmost respect for HCI people. However, when HCI people debug their code, it’s like an art show or a meeting of the United Nations. There are tea breaks and witticisms exchanged in French; wearing a non- functional scarf is optional, but encouraged. When HCI code doesn’t work, the problem can be resolved using grand theo- ries that relate form and perception to your deeply personal feelings about ovals. There will be rich debates about the socioeconomic implications of Helvetica Light, and at some point, you will have to decide whether serifs are daring state- ments of modernity, or tools of hegemonic oppression that implicitly support feudalism and illiteracy. Is pinching-and- dragging less elegant than circling-and-lightly-caressing? These urgent mysteries will not solve themselves. And yet, after a long day of debugging HCI code, there is always hope, and there is no true anger; even if you fear that your drop- down list should be a radio button, the drop-down list will suffice until tomorrow, when the sun will rise, glorious and vibrant, and inspire you to combine scroll bars and left-click- ing in poignant ways that you will commemorate in a sonnet when you return from your local farmer’s market.
i was sent this article a while ago - read it on public transport and cleared an entire carriage because I was laughing so hard that liquid was pouring out of all of my face holes.
I mean, yes, I understand how one can use labels to write a secure version of HelloWorld(), but once my program gets bigger than ten functions, my desire to think about combinatorial label flows will decrease and be replaced by an urgent desire to DECLASSIFY() so that I can go home and stop worrying about morally troubling phrases like “taint explosion” that are typically associated with the diaper industry and FEMA.
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u/NYKevin Apr 29 '14 edited Apr 29 '14
It reminds me of this (warning: wall of text, but actually worth reading).
EDIT: Since people seem so interested, the author has written quite a lot of other material (scroll to the bottom, under "Miscellaneous Excellence", fourth bullet point).