I was just looking into a few things and it occurred to me how weird us programmers must seem to the rest of the world. Here's a partial list of some of the reasons why:

  1. We draw trees upside down; We call the "top" of a tree its "root"; and often we talk of a leaf's siblings, parents and sometimes even children.
  2. We write tons of stuff, but we almost always write the middle before we write the beginning or end; in a lot of code if you want to look at the first and last things that happen you need to look at the bottom of the file.
  3. We often start counting at 0 and call 0 the 1st number; except when we start counting at 1 when we like to say that one is stored in the zero'th index
  4. There is no text in our lives, we deal with strings, but not ones you can tie a knot in.
  5. We often operate like the machines we use... Ask a busy programmer a question and it can be minutes before the programmer context switches and replies to the question.
  6. We have a tendency to consider 'or' in colloquial conversation to be the inclusive 'or' and not the exclusive 'or' that the rest of the world seem to use. Thus "should we go to the movies or to dinner" gets the answer "yes" and not the expected choice...

What other weird things do we do?

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$world=~s/war/peace/g

In reply to Programmers are weird by demerphq

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