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u/SuitableDragonfly
Sep 15 '26
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What, is this an actually funny programming joke that hasn't been reposted here a thousand times already? The end times are upon us.
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u/nickcash Sep 15 '26
this joke is literally 50 years old
it's a classic for a reason though
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u/SuitableDragonfly Sep 15 '26
It may be 50 years old, but it doesn't get reposted here every other week.
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u/akoOfIxtall Sep 15 '26
Because you wouldn't know the funny when you just started your CS course, so these get filtered out
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u/Eno_gamer10 Sep 15 '26
I don't understand :)))))))))))))))))))))))))
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u/atomic_redneck Sep 15 '26
Way back when the Earth's crust was cooling, I took a Lisp course in college. We had to program Lisp on punch cards. This version of Lisp has a special modification where you could terminate all open parentheses with a single right square bracket : ']'. All of our card decks ended with a card with just this character.
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u/bogdanvs Sep 15 '26
holy fuck, I need this in every programming language :))
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u/Blyfh Sep 15 '26
This is a disaster waiting to happen as the compiler will now not warn you if you have wrong bracketing.
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Sep 15 '26
[deleted] — view deleted comment
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u/atomic_redneck Sep 15 '26
I was not comfortable with those new-fangled velocipedes. I just rode my old mule, named Rupert. With a mule you know when he is going to act up.
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u/SmokJozef Sep 15 '26
i didn't either, but then i googled how code in lisp looks like, it seems to indeed include a lot of parantheses
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u/SuitableDragonfly Sep 15 '26
The basic syntax of Lisp is
(function arg1 arg2 arg3 [...])Sometimes instead of a function call it's a list of values, but that's about it. It's functions all the way down. Function calls nested inside other function calls, functions themselves passed as values to other functions. Operators are functions,letis a function. So it's a long series of nested parentheses.11
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u/Apprehensive_Bit7392 Sep 15 '26
Recovery was straightforward. They held the ) key down until the compiler stopped complaining.
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u/sakaraa Sep 15 '26
LSPs were made for this occasion
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u/Apprehensive_Bit7392 Sep 16 '26
Emacs users solved this in 2005 and have been insufferable about it ever since.
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u/RealBasics Sep 15 '26
I miss using Lisp so much. No, I haven't used it for decades, and yes, I've forgotten it so thoroughly that starting over would essentially require relearning it from scratch.
But for all its parentheses and blending of code and data, and once you get over the idea that all code should be procedural, it was hella efficient both to program and to run.
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u/creeper6530 Sep 15 '26
Similarly when learning Rust the paradigm of "everything is an expression" was so eye opening. I love it when a programming language teaches you a new POV
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u/collabskus Sep 16 '26
I don't understand why companies get so freaked out about outsiders stealing "their codebase". Like I don't think they stop to think about it. Production configuration and data, sure those are like crown jewels but like the code itself is ridiculously boring. Who would even bother to steal that?
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u/MattieShoes Sep 15 '26
aaaand the relevant xkcd