Comment by smartmic
21 hours ago
Gone are the days of deterministic programming, when computers simply carried out the operator’s commands because there was no other option but to close or open the relays exactly as the circuitry dictated. Welcome to the future of AI; the future we’ve been longing for and that will truly propel us forward, because AI knows and can do things better than we do.
I had this funny moment when I realized we went full circle...
"INTERCAL has many other features designed to make it even more aesthetically unpleasing to the programmer: it uses statements such as "READ OUT", "IGNORE", "FORGET", and modifiers such as "PLEASE". This last keyword provides two reasons for the program's rejection by the compiler: if "PLEASE" does not appear often enough, the program is considered insufficiently polite, and the error message says this; if it appears too often, the program could be rejected as excessively polite. Although this feature existed in the original INTERCAL compiler, it was undocumented.[7]"
— https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/INTERCAL
Thank you for this. I somehow never heard of this. I thoroughly enjoyed reading that and the loss of sanity it resulted in,
"PLEASE COME FROM" is one of the eldritch horrors of software development.
(It's a "reverse goto". As in, it hijacks control flow from anywhere else in the program behind your unsuspecting back who stupidly thought that when one line followed another with no visible control flow, naturally the program would proceed from one line to the next, not randomly move to a completely different part of the program... Such naivety)
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These are orthogonal from each other.