It's... What I Do
I rarely read an article that makes me wish I had written it. This article is one of those. It's hard for CS guys go even watch movies sometimes. I remember watching Jurassic Park after I had my degree and having to stop the tape at some point when the 12 year old girl is portrayed as the computer whiz and saves everyone by instantly knowing how to use some piece of software she's never seen before. (I wonder if biologists and geneticists have the same trouble with that movie.) And let's not even talk about Hackers. So I want to present the following article:
What code DOESN'T do in real life (that it does in the movies)
A few gems from the article:
1. Code does not move
In films and television code is always sailing across the screen at incredible speeds; it's presented as an indecipherable stream of letters and numbers that make perfect sense to the programmer but dumbfound everyone else. I understand that to the non-savvy person the abilities of a programmer might seem amazingly complex, but do they honestly think we can read shit that isn't sitting still? It'd be like trying to read six newspapers flying around in a tornado. Sure, I can watch a kernel compile, tail a log file, or simply monitor the scrolling output of a program - but the most value I get out of those activities is when execution stops and I can actually scroll back to read what the hell happened (unless the output was going slow enough I could read it as it happened).
4. Code is not three dimensional
Remember in "hackers" when the gibson is depicted as a three dimensional city that the hackers must navigate through? Bullshit! We may use a dash of color in our shell to make things a bit clearer, but last I checked my terminal app doesn't require OpenGL. I'm working here, bitches - I'm not playing quake.
What code DOESN'T do in real life (that it does in the movies)
A few gems from the article:
1. Code does not move
In films and television code is always sailing across the screen at incredible speeds; it's presented as an indecipherable stream of letters and numbers that make perfect sense to the programmer but dumbfound everyone else. I understand that to the non-savvy person the abilities of a programmer might seem amazingly complex, but do they honestly think we can read shit that isn't sitting still? It'd be like trying to read six newspapers flying around in a tornado. Sure, I can watch a kernel compile, tail a log file, or simply monitor the scrolling output of a program - but the most value I get out of those activities is when execution stops and I can actually scroll back to read what the hell happened (unless the output was going slow enough I could read it as it happened).
4. Code is not three dimensional
Remember in "hackers" when the gibson is depicted as a three dimensional city that the hackers must navigate through? Bullshit! We may use a dash of color in our shell to make things a bit clearer, but last I checked my terminal app doesn't require OpenGL. I'm working here, bitches - I'm not playing quake.
posted by John W. Burris at
12:33 PM
1 Comments:
Movies always portray this as this case for what code looks like, but yet somehow I'm always met with an immediate blank stare when I tell someone I'm a programmer.
That's the ultimate conversation killer.
By
Anonymous, at 4:54 PM
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