[Coco] Somewhat OT: The life of a systems programmer

[Rich Carreiro]

If you're done any low-level programming, and even if you
haven't, you have got to read this absolutely hilarious piece
from Usenix's ;login: logout magazine:

 http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/people/mickens/thenightwatch.pdf

A sample:

"Pointers are like Krackens—real, living things that must be
dealt with so that polite society can exist. Make no mistake,
I don’t want to write systems software in a language like C++.
Similar to the Necronomicon, a C++ source code file is a wicked,
obscure document that’s filled with cryptic incantations and
forbidden knowledge. When it’s 3 A.M., and you’ve been debugging
for 12 hours, and you encounter a virtual static friend protected
volatile templated function pointer, you want to go into hibernation
and awake as a werewolf and then find the people who wrote the
C++ standard and bring ruin to the things that they love."

--
Rich Carreiro