As someone who spends time programming, I of course find myself in conversations with people who aren’t as familiar with it. It doesn’t happen all the time, but these discussions can lead to people coming up with some pretty wild misconceptions about what programming is and what programmers do.
- I’m sure many of you have had similar experiences. So, I thought it would be interesting to ask.
It’s like, gotta be just one line of code, right?
I worked in a post office once. I once had a customer demand some package delivery option, if I remember correctly. He was adamant that it was “only a few lines of code”, that I was difficult for not obliging, and that anyone in the postal service should make code changes like that on the whims of customers. It felt like I could have more luck explaining “wallpaper” to the currents in the ocean…
If this isn’t just a saying I haven’t heard of, I’m doing my best to make it a common place phrase, absolutely perfect in this context!
Thank you so kindly :) It’s not a saying, as far as I know.
I used to work on printer firmware; we were implementing a feature for a text box for if you scanned a certain number of pages on a collated, multi-page copy job. The text box told you it would print the pages it had stored to free up memory for more pages; after those pages had printed, another text box would come up asking if you wanted to keep scanning pages, or just finish the job.
The consensus was that it would be a relatively simple change; 3 months and 80 files changed — with somewhere in the ballpark of 10000-20000 lines changed, — proved that wrong.
Anything can fit in one line of you are brave enough.
Everything is one line of code in a turing machine.
I’m pretty sure that’s a breach of style guide in at least three different languages
but probably not C++