@tal@lemmy.today
link
fedilink
36
edit-2
8M

Web browsers: elinks, based on links, which I’m pretty sure was a play on words on lynx, which is a play on words on “links” on a web page.

Then there’s email. There’s mahogany and balsa and mulberry, which are in-jokes referring to pine, which was a joke referring to elm, which stood for ELectronic Mail. Pine has been forked to alpine, in an entirely different play on words.

Open Watcom supports a debugging format called DWARF, which I assumed was a ridiculous acronym, until I learned it only works on ELF binaries.

The big one is how there was a programming language called A Programming Language. There is a B programming language, but it’s unrelated, being developed for Multics… Multics being the inspiration for Unix, a joke about castration. The developers of B went on to develop C. C was followed up by the command to increment a variable: C++. Except some interdisciplinary dorks thought it was a musical note and created C#. D is somehow a sequel to both of those.

There’s a reason why-- look. Nicholas Metropolis, namesake of the raytracing method, was sick of mainframe computers with ridiculous acronyms like ENIAC, AVIDAC, and ILLIAC, so he named his university’s new machine MANIAC. Absolutely no-one got the joke. All computer scientists are broken in the same peculiar way, and it is impossible to satirize how stupid we get when asked to name a thing.

Pine has been forked to Alpine

Wonder if it runs on Alpine the Linux distro.

In other news, I never knew pine’s genetic code still lives on; but I miss elm more. Can we do uw-imap too? Dovecot annoys me.

@beaiouns@lemmy.world
link
fedilink
English
58M

I’ve run alpine on alpine, it works just fine

Create a post

Post funny things about programming here! (Or just rant about your favourite programming language.)

Rules:

  • Posts must be relevant to programming, programmers, or computer science.
  • No NSFW content.
  • Jokes must be in good taste. No hate speech, bigotry, etc.
  • 1 user online
  • 77 users / day
  • 211 users / week
  • 413 users / month
  • 2.92K users / 6 months
  • 1 subscriber
  • 1.53K Posts
  • 33.8K Comments
  • Modlog