Live data from Hacker News

Programmers' Day

en.wikipedia.org

81–89 of 89 posts

Re: Programmers' Day

#81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right, I should have said Extended ASCII

Extended ASCII isn't a proper term either. ASCII is 7-bits, that's all. There's no 8-bit extension to ASCII. Extended ASCII is really more like "some 8-bit encoding that shares the first 127 values with ASCII" -- and there are plenty of such encodings.

On Easter we hunt for eggs.

On Halloween we dress in costumes.

On Festivus we air grievances and perform feats of strength.

On Programmer's Day? We argue about the naming of things!

(Though we have to figure out how to turn it into a drinking game.)

Re: Programmers' Day

#83

Happy Programmer's Day. Wish you a full day of coding with no bugs :P

If you don't have any bugs, how do you know your code is working correctly? I personally never trust code that works on the first try. :)

You should try writing some unit tests then :P

Re: Programmers' Day

#84

Great day to quote from Dijkstra's good old article. At that time(1957) programming was not considered as a profession! Extract from Humble Programmer[1] "..in 1957, I married and Dutch marriage rites require you to state your profession and I stated that I was a programmer. But the municipal authorities of the town of Amsterdam did not accept it on the grounds that there was no such profession. And, believe it or no…

What a quote! I would have opted for exterminator — a satisfactorily legitimate profession, and a nice bit of tongue-in-cheek for those who know what is really meant. As a child, when asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, I always answered that I wanted to kill bugs. Of course, this was a bit before our meaning of "bug" became common knowledge, so it always got a good laugh. I'm thrilled to have followed my child…

He probably would not have chosen that. Another piece of Dijkstra lore is that he really hated the term "bug". He said that by using this term the programmer tried to avoid his responsibility for making correct programs by suggesting that errors somehow creep into your program out of their own volition through no fault of the programmer.

Dijkstra was really hard core in terms of correctness. He insisted that each programmer had to work out a mathematical proof that his program will always provide correct output for every single possible input, and submit that proof when submitting the program. Things did not work out that way.

Re: Programmers' Day

#85
post #46

"...the color white was chosen because it represents a hex number with the largest value in a 24-bit red green blue (RGB) color space: 0xFFFFFF, so programmers worldwide wear white in celebration." Only Programmers would have a holiday in which we wear white after labor day to celebrate.

Being the 256th day, why wouldn't they choose the color 0x000100? Green's my favorite color.

Re: Programmers' Day

#88

Wishing all programmers Manÿ Happÿ Returns of the Daÿ and Maÿ each one of those Returns compile successfullÿ ÿ : 256th ascii character (should henceforth be the Programmers' day symbol) correction: Extended ASCII character per http://www.ascii-code.com/

How about: λ
Post reply on HN