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Realistic Portrayals of Software Programmers?
lwbecker2 asks: "Warren Harrison has written a thought-provoking editorial piece on The Software Developer as Movie Icon. He explores the fact that new entrants to Computer Science curriculum are typically clueless about what 'real' developers actually do. While researching the issue of why this is the case, he determined that some potential CS degree seekers are forming opinions from portrayals in movies and cinema. He describes what he asserts to be inaccurate portrayals of developers in War Games, TRON, and The Net, and asks for input and opinions on 'the impact of the cinema and television on new software developers' expectations, as well as learn of any films that do a better job of portraying our profession...' I am sure Slashdot readers have some input on this, and I am curious if people believe _any_ movie has acurately portrayed software developers?"
Office Space is much closer to reality than fiction for programmers, even though they are a sidebar in the story. Most people in programming are not going to be sitting in their own world, and will have to be interactive in an office environment. In most cases, you better get used to the drugery of TPS reports and interacting with people from a wide variety of departments rather than slamming out code.
sig--we don't need no goddamn sig
"He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere. " -- John Calvin, commenting on Genesis 1
by far the most accurate to date...
It shows programmers working their asses off on some new communications system...
It was a documentary, and it was real people, but what do you want, another Office Space comment?
Actually, a pretty accurate portrayal of a programmer in a movie was in Pump Up the Volume, even though he ran a pirate radio station and wasn't a programmer. He worked out of his parent's basement, was a loner, and had a different on-air personality than in real life.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
just yesterday I did compile a list with all movies on this subject that I know of, with a short rating and a feature list.
fsn stands for "file system navigator" - you can still get it from SGI here.
You need an old version of IRIX to run it (5.3) and I remember doing so back in the day. Basically you can "fly" through the filesystem hierarchy, and the vertical bars are the sizes of the files, colors are for age and the height of the base is the size of the directory.
Nothing you can't accomplish with du and ls, but great for impressing people in a movie :-)
Do you even know anything about perl? -- AC Replying to Tom Christiansen post.
The MCP would win.
-end of line-
The movie Hackers. ...well atleast I can dream that my female coworkers were like Angelina Jolie.
_Hack the Planet!_
My vote goes to "Disclosure" with Michael Douglas and Dennis Miller. Though not strictly software developers, they were engineers (working on CD-ROM drives, IIRC), and they actually seemed to work like engineers. (It was based on a Crieghton novel.) (Besides, Douglas' character lived on Bainbridge Island and rode the ferry to work every day. Ah yes, mad dash at 07:09:59 to make the 7:10 sailing, sip the latte on the boat on the way over, short hike to the office, cut schema all day, out at a reasonable hour to catch the boat back, Fosters on the ferry on the way home. Very realistic. How I miss that.)