[NetBehaviour] What code DOESN'T do in real life (that it does in the movies).
marc
marc.garrett at furtherfield.org
Sun Dec 10 14:45:41 CET 2006
What code DOESN'T do in real life (that it does in the movies).
By Matthew Inman.
Matt craps on a bunch of ridiculous ideas about programming and code
that Hollywood can't seem to stay away from.
Following up our article: Top 20 Hackers in Film History and Vibrant's
Top 10 Servers in the movies, I felt obligated to dispel some of the
notions about programming that these movies endorse. I understand that
Hollywood needs to dress things up to make them more entertaining, but
in the case of programmers, code, and hackers they've done more than
dress things up - they've morphed a little stuffed teddy bear into a
cybernetic polar bear covered in christmas lights and phosphorescent
hieroglyphics with a fog machine pumping rainbow smoke out of his ass.
In other words, they've layered a ridiculous amount of extravagance on
top of something that in reality is very grounded.
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).
2. Code is not green text on a black background
Sure, code can be green text on a black background if you want it to,
but most programmers use syntax highlighting and sysadmins configure
their shell to use ANSI color.
more...
http://www.drivl.com/code.html
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