Author - Daniels Kenneth In category - Software development Publish time - 26 September 2022

Who the hell displays xkcd comics without the mouseover text?! Since I haven’t memorized every bloody comic, I now have to actually click on each and every single comic to get the whole joke… You don’t have permission to access /programming/25-best-programmer-comics.html on this server. Eventually, a more sophisticated version called ex was written by a clever man named Bill Joy. While it has some great improvements over ed, it was still a line-editor.

programmer comic

Then I know right away where I was when I get back to it a few days later. Another webcomic created by developers and dedicated to developers is CommitStrip. In this example, I will show my favourite examples of programming comics. For more of the same, check out the What’s your favorite programmer cartoon? Georgi is a computer science student who loves web development, writing code and crafting interfaces. Delivered with comical coding language, this strip highlights the pitfalls of being a programmer with only a pinch of hyperbole – though I’m sure we’d all appreciate a coffee hat that pipes the good stuff straight into our mouths. Not sure what the life of a programmer involves?

Lazy Programming

This ability greatly reduced the risks of using cat to pass your source code directly to the compiler, so it was no longer a praise-worthy stunt. Thus the line “Real programmers use vim” was NEVER considered true by any UNIX programmer. Using a magnetized needle to flip bits on a hard drive requires nanometric precision and intuitive mastery of binary code, but in the early days of programming, people did use needles sometimes to fix bugs on punched cards. Emacs and Vim are both text editors still in relatively wide use, with complex user interfaces and a range of features. While useful, neither is particularly easy to get started using.

The comic continues from here as a series of programmers state progressively more obscure or outdated methods, culminating in the final programmer who claims that “real” programmers use butterflies. So when someone claims that “real programmers use vim,” they are claiming that RIGHT NOW, vim is the best possible editor for developers of sufficient competence.

This comic strip about the life of a programmer is spot on

His description of his rather surreal programming method is ludicrously complicated and would require an absurd amount of knowledge and forethought to pull off, bordering on omniscience. In the final panel, the Emacs programmer claims that there’s an Emacs code to do that. Real programmers set the universal constants at the start such that the universe evolves to contain the disk with the data they want. I cannot name all creators, and not all of them are known, so here are a few honourable mentions.

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  • Then I know right away where I was when I get back to it a few days later.
  • But if we can figure out how to fix Mart 3000s new ‘feature,’ we’ll definitely be bringing you some more of these comics in the future.
  • I would never claim to be an emacs expert, but I’m reasonably proficient in it.
  • For some, creating a comics is a way to release their frustration.

SO ‘M-x butterfly’ means that there is a function named “butterfly” somewhere, but that it has not been assigned a keyboard shortcut (or it has, but you’re calling it the long way). One of the first very useful tools they wrote was ed, a “line-editor” (i.e. it works one line at a time). It uses some simple commands, and was created to work on very-old-school teletype machines, where you type a command, and ed types a response back. Cat is a Unix program that concatenates and outputs the contents of files; it’s usually run from a Unix shell, which allows its output to be written or appended to a file. It isn’t intended as an editor at all but is convenient to display files. Actually editing files with it would be even less convenient than ed.

“Just One More Change” And Other Client Requests: Comic Artist Nadine Redlich Takes On The Dreaded Change Request

This comic is a satire on the idea of a Real Programmer. I would never claim to be an emacs expert, but I’m reasonably proficient in it. Command of the form M-x are a way of calling commands by name.

  • Using very little the way of resources, it allowed you to create a text document of any length, including source code in whatever language you wanted to program in.
  • The revolutionary web design tool for creating responsive websites and apps.
  • Also I will put some random characters into the script where I left off so the editor will show me an error on that line as soon as I open the script file.
  • The use of a magnetized needle may also be a reference to the Apollo AGC guidance computer, whose instructions were physically written as patterns of wires looped around or through cylindrical magnets in order to record binary code.

Formerly a staff writer for Creative Bloq, his work has also appeared on Creative Boom and in the pages of ImagineFX, Computer Arts, 3D World, and .net. He has been a D&AD New Blood judge, and has a particular interest in picture books. It occurs to me that, during the Apollo space program, the core-rope memory which contained the program code for the ship’s onboard guidance computer was, quite literally, hand-woven. While it was non-magnetic, a needle was used to thread a single strand of wire through a frame containing an array of ferrite cores.

The very clever Bill Joy took advantage of these magic character sequences to create his wonderful “full-screen” text editor vi. With vi, the user could see a screen-full of text at once. Eventually, teletypes were replaced with terminals. Using very little the way of resources, it allowed you to create a text document of any length, including source code in whatever language you wanted to program in. Sign upStay updated with our articles and workshops.

programmer comic

It seems possible that it was a simple typo, but since I’ve never seen one in the strip before, I’m somewhat skeptical. And it was written by some very clever people. The title text further suggests manipulating the universal constants in order to create a universe in which the required computer data will exist.

There’s a community of very smart people that basically thinks this. According to the logic, the programmers shown may even represent the fulfillment of this master programmer’s plan.

He spells out the chores of being a programmer in a launguage everyone can understand. The trouble was, using a line-editor like ed or ex requires you to have a very good mental model of the document you are creating. Unfortunately, humans aren’t very good at this, so they constantly need to refresh their mental model by printing out big chunks of the document they are working on. When autocomplete results are available use up and down arrows to review and enter to select.

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