[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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