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Died from reading this (lemmy.world)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/programmerhumor@lemmy.ml
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[–] 36 points 2 years ago* (2 children)

Web browsers: elinks, based on links, which I'm pretty sure was a play on words on lynx, which is a play on words on "links" on a web page.

Then there's email. There's mahogany and balsa and mulberry, which are in-jokes referring to pine, which was a joke referring to elm, which stood for ELectronic Mail. Pine has been forked to alpine, in an entirely different play on words.

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  • [–] 7 points 2 years 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.

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