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in reply to Re: Programmers are weird
in thread Programmers are weird

We have regularly scheduled dumps, sometimes several per day.

Numbers like 512 and 8192 look strangely familiar to us; we think kilo equals 1024.

We use the word "code" as if it were something, like water or sand, that can be put in a barrel. We refer to "core" as place name, without an article, like "Newark".

We are horrified by bugs. We openly speak of spending hours "debugging", and don't find it particularly indecorous.

We bounce our daemons, and fork our children.

the lowliest monk

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Re^3: Programmers are weird
by demerphq (Chancellor) on Aug 30, 2005 at 14:21 UTC

    Even weirder, we have a tendency to store our dumps in extremely safe places for very long times. And we even practice and test whether our dumps can be restored!

    ---
    $world=~s/war/peace/g

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      $whirled = whir($peas);

      print substr("Just another Perl hacker", 0, -2);
      		 - apotheon
      CopyWrite Chad Perrin

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Re^3: Programmers are weird
by blazar (Canon) on Sep 06, 2005 at 11:07 UTC
    Numbers like 512 and 8192 look strangely familiar to us; we think kilo equals 1024.
    Not only, but also some of us -including me- know by heart 32768 and 65536. Though I've yet to meet anyone who knows the output of perl -le 'print 1<<24' or perl -le 'print ~0' (32-bit machine here!) in anticipation, albeit I suspect quite more than one does. Anyone here?

    Ouch! Now that I'm staring at them I fear I will learn them by heart too... ;-)

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      1<<24? Sure. I even used that knowledge to show off like a dork in a statistics lecture in college. The prof was doing some kind of probability calculation that led to a result of 1 in 4^12, I think, and asked someone to punch 4^12 into a calculator and tell him what it was. Of course, 4^12 is 2^24, which I happened to know by heart was 16,777,216. (Why? It's the number of possible colors on a display that allocates one byte each to the red, green, and blue channels, and it just stuck with me.)

      When I rattled off that number a fraction of a second after his asking, without my calculator out, a bunch of folks in the lecture hall turned and looked at me like I was Rain Man or something. Of course, I was just lucky; I couldn't have done it if it hadn't been a reasonably common power of 2.

              $perlmonks{seattlejohn} = 'John Clyman';

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      In fact I know the entire 2x sequence for 0 <= x <= 18 by heart… Ah, the joys of programming assembler. :-)

      Makeshifts last the longest.

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