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Immortal Code
ziani writes ""... Sometimes a piece of code is so elegant, so evolved, that it outlasts everything else." Nice article at Wired wondering how much great (and lousy) code is lost due to business failures."
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It's nice to see some elegant code in this world of bloated redundant code... Is it me or does it seem that open source is written much more elegantly? Is this just because we can actually see the source :) I'd sit in a corner rocking back and forth if I was forced to read Micro$oft code...
#! /bin/bash
while true; do
sleep 1
done
int main()
{
printf("Hello world\n");
return 0;
}
Seems like the most well known piece of code in programming history.
The system cannot find the path specified.
C:\>
... in COBOL nonetheless!
000100 IDENTIFICATION DIVISION.
000200 PROGRAM-ID. HELLOWORLD.
000300 DATE-WRITTEN. 02/05/96 21:04.
000400* AUTHOR BRIAN COLLINS
000500 ENVIRONMENT DIVISION.
000600 CONFIGURATION SECTION.
000700 SOURCE-COMPUTER. RM-COBOL.
000800 OBJECT-COMPUTER. RM-COBOL.
000900
001000 DATA DIVISION.
001100 FILE SECTION.
001200
100000 PROCEDURE DIVISION.
100100
100200 MAIN-LOGIC SECTION.
100300 BEGIN.
100400 DISPLAY " " LINE 1 POSITION 1 ERASE EOS.
100500 DISPLAY "HELLO, WORLD." LINE 15 POSITION 10.
100600 STOP RUN.
100700 MAIN-LOGIC-EXIT.
100800 EXIT.
*nix.org - Featuring BSD, Linux, OS X, Solaris, & More!
Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate. Ex-O'Reilly/MIT employee, now a full-time Google employee.
Walla, the program now works! ...
Computers are not "smart" like humans, thus they require very specific instructions in order to do anything.
Yes, humans are able to know what you mean even when you type totally the wrong word, like "Walla".
Left with nothing, Jim and Janet Baker turned to the courts. In a failed attempt to retrieve Dragon from among the L&H assets that were now locked up by bankruptcy laws, they hired the powerhouse law firm run by David Boies.
David Boies?
MAN, is that code GONE.
Blearf. Blearf, I say.
Ia! Ia! COBOL Ftaghn!
THIS CODE IS YOUR CODE - you know what tune to sing it to
This code is your code, this code is my code,
To California from the south of Finland,
From the GNU compiler, to the ELF binaries,
This code was made for you and me.
As I was trolling the threads on Slashdot,
In Unreal Tournament, I need an aimbot,
I saw before me the new KDE,
This code was made for you and me.
This code is your code, this code is my code,
To California from the south of Finland,
From the GNU compiler, to the ELF binaries,
This code was made for you and me.
Downloaded sourcecode, unzipped the tarballs,
Dot slash configure, then make-installs,
And all around me, my systems showed me,
This code was made for you and me.
This code is your code, this code is my code,
To California from the south of Finland,
From the GNU compiler, to the ELF binaries,
This code was made for you and me.
My eyes! MY EYES!!
Forget the whales - save the babies.
Are we speaking of "immortal" in the sense of vampiric, blood- and money-sucking immortal code(Windows), zombie code(DOS) or of angelic/divine code(my database applications)?
"This song is Copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of Copyright # 154085, for a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin' it without our permission, will be mighty good friends of ourn, cause we don't give a dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, that's all we wanted to do."
1000 SlashDot sigs
That beautiful piece of elegant code you wrote will be lost in a system crash as soon as you move on, if not sooner. That horrid inefficient kludge you wrote early in your career will be retained forever, and when through the vagaries of the world, you end up at the company which owns that code, you will end up responsible for maintaining it.
Not necessarily true. In India, the man who sells code might be known as the "code-walla." Therefore, his worker-bee might just be inclined to exclaim "Walla! The program now works!"
Hot Damn! It's the Soggy Bottom Boys!