Programming Pasta
Today I sent over a patch to Tim Post for srce, he revised it and sent it back to me for sign-off. A quick read through and I saw this item:
/* TODO: Fix me, this function is beginning to resemble pasta */
Finding it rather humorous, I brought it up to him. This was his reply:
Well, there are varying degrees of pasta:
* you have linguini, easy to sort
* feutticini , a little harder
* spaghetti, annoying
* then angel hair pasta, impossible
right now, its at linguini
I wonder, though, because Tim made another comment: “but would a well written program be lasagna?”
We got to talking some more about this as it had the potential to get really silly…
Would an over abundance of perl modules mean risotto?
Are C libraries a bunch of tortellini? - Why yes, but you have cheese, beef … and vegan
Then you have ravioli , those are crypt libraries because you can never be too sure whats in them…
Of course there’s that whole diet libc thing … would that be ‘Adkins’ pasta?
Now, a rare pasta.. for c++ libs? - Tim couldn’t think of one, he doesn’t eat processed foods.
As for assembly… that’s the dough that eventually becomes angel hair pasta.
Since ‘flex’ is usually used to generate lexical parsers, that would be the rolling pin.
Pasta Salad: This is what happens when the angry fruit salad of an interface is more complicated than the pasta found in the code. We call this “Mayo”
Pasta with meatballs maybe is tainted kernel code? No, those are ‘blobs’, Linus put them there.
And if you ask me, parsing strings in C must be the pasta that was left on the counter overnight; it’s real hard and sticks badly. Tim disagrees, though couldn’t come up with an alternative.
Xen is the spaghetti resulting from when your Aunt Margret stole the recipie from Grandpa, a retired Colonel.
And there is no pasta crazy enough for m4; so we’ll just call it fucking psychotic:
AC_ARG_ENABLE(unsafe, [ --enable-unsafe enable unsafe operation [[default=no]]],[
if test "$enableval" = no; then
ac_enable_unsafe=no
else
ac_enable_unsafe=yes
fi
],[ ac_enable_unsafe=no])
All that for one goddamn switch!!!
Quite the revelation. These remarks remind me of this one I read a little while ago:
If a programming language was a boat
I agree with most of them… PHP itself isn’t a bamboo raft, just a lot of people’s PHP code ends up looking like one.