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The engineers of the 1970s figured that someone else, further into the future, would fix the problems they were causing (classic baby-boomers).
Scrolling down in Excel can feel like it goes on for ever, but if you drag down for long enough you will eventually hit the end of the spreadsheet. If you’d like to go to visit the void at the end of the rows, I can confirm it takes about ten minutes of maximum-speed scrolling.
But at least now I have a framed letter from the UK government saying that they don’t think accurate maths is important and they don’t believe street signs should have to follow the laws of geometry.
Sesame Street is a repeat offender. In Ernie’s book I Don’t Want to Live on the Moon, the cover shows stars shining right through a crescent moon. And in a ‘C in space’ segment, the moon looks surprisingly happy, despite the fact that these stars are shining through it. Okay, yes, the moon having a face and emotions is not astronomically accurate either, but that is still no excuse for teaching children inaccurate geometry. I expect more from a supposedly ‘educational’ programme.
And people are not buying tickets for the expected value, they are buying the permission to dream.
We can believe in cheeses.
The programmer mantra should be ‘Always comment on your code.’ And make the comments helpful. I’ve reviewed dense code I wrote years before, to find the only comment is ‘Good luck, future Matt.’
as a hobbyist programmer, I use Python: the friendliest of all the languages. After that are the languages which don’t make any concession if the coder makes mistakes, but at least they’re not malicious about it. These are the vast majority of your coding options: C++, Java, Ruby, PHP … and so on. Then, of course, there are the languages which hate the very concept of humans. These are born because programmers think they are hilarious and that making deliberately unwieldy programming languages is almost a sport. The classic is a language called brainf_ck,
And that is before we get to programming languages in which: you’re only allowed to use the word ‘chicken’; the code needs to be formatted like you’re ordering at a drive-through window; or everything is written as sheet music. I think, due to survivor bias, programmers tend to be a sadistic bunch who enjoy frustration.
‘We’re having a problem sending email out of the department.’ ‘What’s the problem?’ ‘We can’t send mail more than 500 miles.’ ‘Come again?’
The head of statistics explained that no one in the department could send email more than about 520 miles. Some emails sent to people within that distance still failed, but all emails going further than 520 miles definitely failed. This had apparently been going on for a few days, but they didn’t report it sooner because they were still gathering enough data to establish the exact distance. One of their geostatisticians was apparently making a very nice map of where email could and could not be sent to.
Always hilarious, internet engineers have designated error code 418 as ‘I’m a teapot.’ It is returned by any internet-enabled teapots, which are sent a request to make coffee. It was introduced as part of the 1998 release of Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol (HTCPCP) specifications. Originally an April Fools’ joke, connected teapots have of course since been made and run according to HTCPCP. An attempt to remove this error in 2017 was defeated by the Save 418 Movement, which preserved it as ‘a reminder that the underlying processes of computers are still made by humans’.
