Slashdot Mirror
Anger as a Software Design Philosophy
Chilliwilli writes "Spending more time cursing your code than writing it? Well now there's an answer. feckfeck (a language in the vein of Whitespace and Brainf*ck) will help you get back that precious time by converting your foul words into code. You've heard the hype surrounding VLIWs, well here are FLIWs (4 letter instruction words). The great thing is the more angry you get the more code you'll write. For those programmers on performance related pay this is great news."
"Does foobar mean anything?"
Actually, it doesn't. The original word, which has been misspelled as "foobar" is "fubar" which is Fucked Up Beyond All Recognition. It's a shame that almost no one uses the right spelling.
IBM had PL/1, with syntax worse than JOSS,
And everywhere the language went, it was a total loss...
...since it's a UK site, this is supposed to be "shag."
While "shag" is no biggie in the US, it is apparently almost as offensive a word in other countries as "fuck" is to Americans.
From the IMDB trivia page for "Austin Powers 2: The Spy Who Shagged Me":
In the U.S., "shag" is far less offensive than in other English-speaking countries. Singapore briefly forced a title change to "The Spy Who Shioked Me." ("Shioked" means "treated nicely.")
~Philly
Does foobar mean anything?
That's debatable, but it might have descended from the acronym FUBAR, which translates to:
Fucked Up Beyond all Recognition
or, alternatively:
Fucked Up Beyond all Repair
// TODO: Insert Cool Sig
Just because you don't have it installed...
/usr/bin/gasp
radon28:~$ which gasp
radon28:~$ gasp --help
gasp: Gnu Assembler Macro Preprocessor
etc. etc. etc..
The most recent example is the "virtual key" codes in the KeyEvent Java class. Namely, what is the difference between VK_PLUS and VK_ADD !? You can look up their values - VK_ADD is 107, VK_PLUS is 521 - so they aren't synonyms. My guess would be one is produced using "Shift-Equals" on many keyboards, and the other is next to the 6 and the 9 on the numeric pad. But the docs helpfully don't say which is which. (Fortunately, simply looking to see if the character field is "+" is probably sufficient.)
(Also look for VK_SEPARATER , which is included for backwards compatibility, and VK_SEPARATOR , which replaces it. There are numerous instances of spelling errors throughout the Java API. Plus, this is another VK for which I have no clue where it is on the keyboard - maybe it isn't present on PC-104 QWERTY boards?)
But, yes, the most frusterating experience I have had in programming isn't from my own code, but from trying to figure out official documentation. Especially when the documentation is provably wrong - no, you can't use a comma-separated list as a value to cursor in IE6's CSS, despite the documentation saying that it works.
I know there are other, worse examples, but this is what comes to mind. (I remember spending an entire summer trying to get Java code to call an Oracle stored procedure, and failing. I spent a lot of time reading Slashdot that summer, while trying to come up with another method to force it to work. We finally decided it was impossible.)
Of course, incomplete and incorrect documentation are not just found in commerical software - many open source libraries are even worse.
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
The Official Scrabble Player's Dictionary is the publication suitable for "recreational and school" play. Kiddies, this is what you can buy in your local bookstore. In this tome, words that have a usage note due to obscenity or vulgarity in Webster's are omitted.
The difference in the lists (4-letter only) is:
ABOS ARSE CUNT DAGO FART FRIG FUCK GOOK GOYS
HEBE JEWS JISM KIKE MICK OFAY PEED PISS POMS
SHAT SHIT SPIC SPIK TURD TWAT WOGS WOPS YIDS