Programmer Humor

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Post funny things about programming here! (Or just rant about your favourite programming language.)

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Died from reading this (lemmy.world)

submitted 8 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 36 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (2 children)

Web browsers: elinks, based on links, which I'm pretty sure was a play on words on lynx, which is a play on words on "links" on a web page.

Then there's email. There's mahogany and balsa and mulberry, which are in-jokes referring to pine, which was a joke referring to elm, which stood for ELectronic Mail. Pine has been forked to alpine, in an entirely different play on words.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 8 months ago

Open Watcom supports a debugging format called DWARF, which I assumed was a ridiculous acronym, until I learned it only works on ELF binaries.

The big one is how there was a programming language called A Programming Language. There is a B programming language, but it's unrelated, being developed for Multics... Multics being the inspiration for Unix, a joke about castration. The developers of B went on to develop C. C was followed up by the command to increment a variable: C++. Except some interdisciplinary dorks thought it was a musical note and created C#. D is somehow a sequel to both of those.

There's a reason why-- look. Nicholas Metropolis, namesake of the raytracing method, was sick of mainframe computers with ridiculous acronyms like ENIAC, AVIDAC, and ILLIAC, so he named his university's new machine MANIAC. Absolutely no-one got the joke. All computer scientists are broken in the same peculiar way, and it is impossible to satirize how stupid we get when asked to name a thing.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Pine has been forked to Alpine

Wonder if it runs on Alpine the Linux distro.

In other news, I never knew pine's genetic code still lives on; but I miss elm more. Can we do uw-imap too? Dovecot annoys me.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 8 months ago

I've run alpine on alpine, it works just fine