11 thoughts on “A very select audience

    • No, BASIC is an airsoft version of MP-5-SD. From a distance, it looks OK, but it’s definitely a toy, and there is no way to accomplish serious results. Additionally, if you use it first, before learning any other languages/forearms, you acquire a lot of bad habits that take a long time to train you out of. Users of real programming languages/firearms variously view you as ‘that’s cute, you might be worth something when you grow up’, ‘go away, kid, ya bother me’, or ‘if you don’t stop doing that, you will go blind’.

        • Assembler is a 0% lower, i.e. a square block of steel or aluminum.

          Be grateful, the old timers used to have to start from a pile of iron ore.

          • Yeah, but the end result is a full-auto machine gun that runs as fast as possible and never (OK, rarely) jams.

          • You had ore? Heck, we had to resort to nucleosynthesis to get our iron!

            (By which I mean I was doing assembler programming and machine language patches on a “naked” — no operating system — PDP-11 clone.)

          • Don’t get too full of yourself. From what I hear, there’s this old greybeard out there that had to bootstrap his computing environment with a whole bunch of “LET THERE BE…” something-something-something declarations.

            His code is absolutely perfect, but the documentation is sparse, and the user community is mostly full of idiots that don’t read it or just won’t follow it if they had.

  1. Hmm, I just checked on a script that was running for 115 hours, guess that makes it a quad mount .50?

    • I think it’s a Mosin: powerful, simple to pick up and use, and a bit of a relic but has a hard core of enthusiasts and more modern upgrades available than you might expect at first glance.

  2. Programming 16-bit Windows where variables declared as LPCSTR are common would be a Mosin with the bayonet attached.

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