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It Is Programmer Day - Why So Apathetic?
mikejuk writes: Programmers Day comes around every year and yet each year it seems to be increasingly ignored. Why, when we are trying to encourage children to take up all things computing, is Programmers Day such a big flop? If you've not encountered it before, the idea is that on a specific day we celebrate computer programmers. It is designated to be on the 256th day of the year, which in most years is September 13th and this year, 2015, it falls on a Sunday. If you don't know why it's the 256th day, then you probably aren't a programmer and there is no point in explaining. The usual suggestions for things to do on programmer day include telling jokes and other fairly lame stuff. How about instead: Teach someone to program just a little bit.
When is Plumber Day?
April 25th.
Car Mechanic Day?
November 15th.
Kindergarten Teacher Day
Teacher day, may 5th and 6th.
It's hard to take an 'appreciation day' seriously. I do my job, I get paid. I don't feel unappreciated. Pie day is cool, because pies taste good.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Not quite so Random....
Many years ago, I was involved in a Research Project concerning Indexing.
For those who have forgotten about Books, an Index was a place at the back of a Book where significant People, Places, Events, and Ideas were collected in Alphabetical Order, with relevant page numbers listed. Depending on Edition, the page numbers varied.
This is an awful, tedious task by Hand; we were using a PDP-11.
How to determine what gets Indexed?
We started with anything Capitalized, with the exception of a few specific words. (The, A, I, And, But... that sort of Thing.)
So we had Real Names, Place Names, Titles of People and Things, Concepts, Acronyms, Historical Events... What we were actually developing was the Concept of Hyperlinking, but we just called it CAI- Computer Assisted Indexing.
Well, feeding texts in caused some Problems, because there never were consistent rules of Capitalization.
So we taught the PDP-11 to Capitalize the incoming Texts according to common Indexing Rules.
The curious result was that even in casual work between the group, Capitalization took off. We started thinking _differently_ about writing. That is a hard habit to break.
And then Summer and the Money ran out.
If you go back and look at my first Post, you may find that a little further background is in there in the form of Capitalization. Note that "Optician" and "Optometrist" are Capitalized. Do you know the difference? "Eye" is Capitalized because it is a Pun. "Leaded Glass" is Capitalized because of the significant differing physical and optical qualities from regular Glass, and all those Aberrant Plastics.
The PDP-11 would have quite approved. It would happily Index the Hell out of that Piece, and this one, and construct this impressive Index, with page numbers from Other Works added as they were submitted.
All that would be missing in this process of going directly from "Optician" to "Optometrist", is the later technique of Asterixing or Underlining to indicate a "Link".
Oh, and a Mouse. We were using Teletypes and a Hazeltine Terminal.
One reason for people's apathy could be that the actual "Programmer's Day" is Oct 31st, also known as Programmer's X-mas because, as you're all aware, 31 Oct == 25 Dec. This has been celebrated in Sweden for a long time, since the 18th century in fact, and considered so important that Oct 31st is Edit's name day[1].
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_name_day_list_of_2001