945
Died from reading this
(lemmy.world)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 04 Mar 2024
945 points (97.4% liked)
Programmer Humor
32410 readers
341 users here now
Post funny things about programming here! (Or just rant about your favourite programming language.)
Rules:
- Posts must be relevant to programming, programmers, or computer science.
- No NSFW content.
- Jokes must be in good taste. No hate speech, bigotry, etc.
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
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.
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.
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.
I've run alpine on alpine, it works just fine