Jokes that Aren't Funny There are several design decisions in computer systems, some which I use and some which I rightfully ignore, I'd thought to be jokes upon first learning of them. They're still jokes, but aren't funny. Programming is a most practical form of mathematics, revealing better than anything else what occurs when idiots are allowed to define the abstractions. Some idiots now believe abstraction to be myth. The first joke involves a ``security measure'' which has recently bothered me again. The idiots who created UNIX thought it to be useful to prohibit the first thousand and some ports from unprivileged program use. The train of thoughts which seriously leads to such a measure would've derailed in the physical world, but persists in the world of stupid thoughts. I was trying to disable this entirely and recently, to find that the knob amongst the thousands already present is only available in a new version of the particular UNIX dumbfuckery, after so many decades of it being naught but a nuisance. The measure's measure is to unnecessarily privilege a program so that it can work around the fuckery put in its way. The ``security measure'' leads to less security, with basic thinking. Only someone who fellates UNIX could defend something so pitifully stupid, utterly ineffective, and so worthless. The C language is broken beyond all repair, not that idiots have stopped trying, but its basic dogma is to get out of the programmer's way, except for all of those many ways it gets in the programmer's way. The very idea that basic flaws, such as array boundary violations, haven't been stomped out of existence for good is an indictment of the human race, but I won't focus on the C language, in this. I'd thought it to be a joke when I'd first learned that the C++ language compilers vomit messages so many hundreds or thousands of lines long upon error, and that compiling such programs can take hours to finish. Ada features none of these flaws, but was designed by committee and one that couldn't be fooled into believing horse shit about the capabilities of computers at that. Yet I look around and see the C++ language championed as a real language for serious work. I can't wait until these fools cause a real disaster, one that kills more than just a few people, and in a way undeniably connected to bad programming, and lastly as publicly as possible, so such fools could be damned because of it. I won't at all be surprised to see large reams of scientific research invalidated because the Python language was used. A set limit on program recursion is unreasonable, but not necessarily a joke. I found it to be much more amusing to learn that unnamed functions were restricted to a single line of code, as a conscious limit for absolutely no reason. Aesthetics are only good reasons for languages that have been designed properly. Programmers using the Python language don't use that ``everything is an object'' model, but instead that ``everything is a library someone else already wrote'' model. A reader informed me that one of the Python limitations is even worse than I'd first thought, at not one line of code for an unnamed function, but instead a single expression, in total. How arbitrary. It's a joke of a different form when people realize programming to be the art of automation, only to ignore automation when it comes to programming itself; I've seen the rare idiot almost realize this, only to fall back on dogma, because he's been programmed himself and continues unawares. This basic joke is related to the joke of programmers viewing themselves to be wizards or, more recently, lords over the filthy masses who can't make decisions for themselves. The use of neural network nonsense, in preference to proper programming systems, is more evidence that none of them know how to program. There are undoubtedly jokes I've missed, but these were those who returned to me, during my writing. .