Love the shoutout to Margaret Hamilton
this post was submitted on 07 May 2025
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Programmer Humor
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The majority of "programmers in the past" should be women actually, but our meme formats are still too patriarchal to express that in 2025.
We need to bring back 2010-2012 rage comic memes. All we needed was a badly cut-out blonde wig to trans Derp's gender.
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I still want to get into coding the OG manual way (because I enjoy pain and disappointment apparently) but now it seems like a waste of time since vibe coders and 13 year olds already are lightyears ahead of me. Also I have no reason to learn it, all apps are already built xD
I'm in the same boat. I used to be an amateur front and back end web developer. Almost made a text based RPG in middle school. I had to stop when shit got crazy in high school and college, but I don't feel like any programming is worth my time right now. I'm focusing on gardening and maybe some cooking. You know, human activities that we can still enjoy.
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I once had a junior calling me in a panic because he didn't know how to quit nano. NANO!
Nano... Like... The one that has all the keybinds permanently shown at the bottom of the screen?
Burnt into the old LCD screen.
And your retinas.
Onscreen instructions unclear, pressed Shift+6+X. Still stuck in Nano.
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That deserves a "do you know how to read?", because the exit command is on the lower part of the screen for nano
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QA: "Yeah, Hi. Can you look at this defect ticket?"
Reading ticket details...
Me: "Let me guess. Is [whatshisname] responsible for this?"
QA: "Yeah."
Me: "Get him to fix it."
QA: "I tried. Like four times."
Me: Sigh "I'll take care of it."
QA: "Thank you!"
I feel very confident in my understanding of random 8 bit CPUs and their support chips, but asking me to center a div is like this xkcd.
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Can't exit Vim
Ah yes, the legendary filter
I first tried vi in the early 90s, before I had easy access to online resources. I had to open a new shell and kill the vi process to exit it. Next time I dialed into my usual BBS I asked how to exit that thing. But since then I've liked it, because vi has been on every system I ever ssh'ed into.
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80s programmers hated Unix, btw. Look up Unix Haters Handbook, it's a free and funny read
They also hated their local sysadmin. BOFH still holds up in a few key ways.
Thanks. I didn't know there was a real band called "The Pipi Pickers" and I might have lived on happily without that knowledge.
Unix Haters Handbook
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_UNIX-HATERS_Handbook
Didn't knew this. It has 360 pages, wow!
EDIT:
The Macintosh on which I type this has 64MB: Unix was not designed for the Mac. What kind of challenge is there when you have that much RAM?
hehe
Good thing GNU's not Unix
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I have never Googled "how to center div 2025" because the last time I had to center a div was in 2024. I've never asked ChatGPT to fix a syntax error because I use Copilot. Exiting Vim is basically the only thing I know how to do in Vim, but I can do it. And my bug fixin' is generally one-for-one.
On the flip side, I can write some code without StackOverflow and AI. Writing a game in Assembly, these days, is for a specific kind of hobbyist or absolute fools. Languages using pointers are mostly for specific types of application and completely irrelevant for most programmers these days -- and the overwhelming bulk of us are better for it. And writing code by hand is an incredible talent and skill, but again, essentially useless these days.
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Hey now. Searching stack overflow circia 2011 to 2018 was an Art. You had to know enough to find the correct question that wasn't deleted because a mod thought it was a duplicate of another question
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Hey buddy, if I fix one bug and cause three more, it's called job security. Where's my medal?
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One of my favourite game dev stories from the 1980s is the story of Elite. It was a game people thought couldn't be made. Most devs thought hardware wasn't powerful enough and publishers thought it wouldn't be fun enough.
It was one of the first properly 3D open world video games ever made. I think when it released it sold nearly as many copies as there were home computers that could run it.
In order to make the game small enough to fit on a cassette tape they had to ditch basic and program the entire game, world in assembly.
There's a fantastic video about it here: https://youtu.be/lC4YLMLar5I
In order to make the game small enough to fit on a cassette tape they had to ditch basic and program the entire game, world in assembly.
Putting aside the fact that the majority of commercial games of the time were written in assembly (or other low-level languages) just as a matter of course, I strongly suspect that programming the game in assembly was an execution speed issue, and not a cassette space issue. Regular audio cassettes easily held enough data to fill an average 8-bit home computer's memory many times over, whether that data was machine code or BASIC instruction codes.
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I once had an intern attempt to install sudo using NPM and when that didn't work he asked ChatGPT "Why can't I install sudo from NPM?" while I'm trying to explain it to him.
He was smart, but somehow knew very little about commercial computers despite being on the verge of getting his master's in computer science.
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