mindbleach , 4 months ago

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.