It's time to crash
Losin' my mind, losin' my mind, losin' my mind
Yeah it's time to crash
Aerosmith
Warily, I press the button, CRASH! Visions of destruction, a train jums the tracks at Whitefield station, it plows into the dirt, nine hundred thousand tonnes of steel pound into the fragile ground. As the dust settles on the mayhem you can see people running, wild, silent screams pierce your eardrums. A few kilometers down the road, at HAL airport, an aircraft has just managed to lift itself off the earth when a shockwave, comes pulsing through the thick humid night sky, the wings warp as the wave passes through the body of the plane. Flapping its appendages wildly like a bird with a broken wing, the aircraft careens towards the solid earth, it comes down and instantly erupts into a ball of flames. Hundreds perish in a single instant, in a great fiery inferno.
The fireball illuminates the night sky and from afar casts its glow over the carcass of the wrecked train. But that's just what my sleep deprived mind conjures up. As my finger slowly releases the depressed key, a few insignificant lines of text appear on the screen under the dollar prompt.
prog11.c: In function ‘main’: prog11.c:51: error: ‘f’ undeclared (first use in this function)
prog11.c:51: error: (Each undeclared identifier is reported only once
prog11.c:51: error: for each function it appears in.)
prog11.c:69: error: invalid type argument of ‘unary *’
As a wave of curses work their way up from deep within, only to be suppressed by selaed lips, the CRT, uncaring, continues to spray electrons onto the screen and the text persists, no matter how much I try to will it away.
And that dear reader is a crash.
No fiery infernos, no mangled metal, no broken bodies, not even a damn papercut. Just ten fingers with chewed fingernails, dancing across a field of white plastic keys. Thats not what it sounds like though. The first time a program of mine crashed, all I got was some gibberish telling me something was wrong, not even a damn beep. Sorely disillusioned, I opened my source code and began to 'debug'. There's something about the programmer mentality that seems to compel them to use very descriptive language in describing these rather mundane occurrences.
Scientists suffer from that too, except they started off in classical language mode, where everything was either Greek or Latin. All it achieved was to scare off generations of prospective scientists who probably switched to subjects that did not require learning another language. Then with a generation of scientists who grew up under the watchful eye of the media came the modern phase. With that transition, we suddenly went from calling everything either alpha or beta to naming genes 'sonic the hedgehog'! Something gives me the feeling a Tommy Vercetti gene is not too far away.
Chemists though in my opinion take the cake when it comes to ridiculous nomenclature and it's not just because I abhor the subject, a small simple and decidedly insignificant molecule may have a name of such humongous proportions it makes me break into a sweat just thinking about the possible structure. On the other hand one can hardly blame them, there are just so many things, if you are curious, you could look up AiB or alpha amino isobutyric acid.
Statisticians, now there's much I can say about this bunch of shifty number jugglers, except this is a subject that I'm slowly growing to love and I don't want to do anything to affect the relationship at this point. However since I am on the subject, this is one branch of science with more names than any other. Everything is someone's axiom or so-and-so's hypothesis, on top of that everyone is either French or Russian. Why the fuck don't we have a Bob's distribution, it sound way less intimidating that Poisson.
Jargon is inevitable, it's universal actually it's something that unifies almost every field of human endevour. If anyone recalls, in one of my last posts before I left Delhi, I wrote about my experiences with mechanic lingo., this is pretty much the same thing right? Except here it's a tad more formalized and just sound more respectable when coming out of the mouth of a well dressesed (err.. no, make that well paid... umm. No make it respected...(again only occasionally)) scientist.
Losin' my mind, losin' my mind, losin' my mind
Yeah it's time to crash
Aerosmith
Warily, I press the button, CRASH! Visions of destruction, a train jums the tracks at Whitefield station, it plows into the dirt, nine hundred thousand tonnes of steel pound into the fragile ground. As the dust settles on the mayhem you can see people running, wild, silent screams pierce your eardrums. A few kilometers down the road, at HAL airport, an aircraft has just managed to lift itself off the earth when a shockwave, comes pulsing through the thick humid night sky, the wings warp as the wave passes through the body of the plane. Flapping its appendages wildly like a bird with a broken wing, the aircraft careens towards the solid earth, it comes down and instantly erupts into a ball of flames. Hundreds perish in a single instant, in a great fiery inferno.
The fireball illuminates the night sky and from afar casts its glow over the carcass of the wrecked train. But that's just what my sleep deprived mind conjures up. As my finger slowly releases the depressed key, a few insignificant lines of text appear on the screen under the dollar prompt.
prog11.c: In function ‘main’: prog11.c:51: error: ‘f’ undeclared (first use in this function)
prog11.c:51: error: (Each undeclared identifier is reported only once
prog11.c:51: error: for each function it appears in.)
prog11.c:69: error: invalid type argument of ‘unary *’
As a wave of curses work their way up from deep within, only to be suppressed by selaed lips, the CRT, uncaring, continues to spray electrons onto the screen and the text persists, no matter how much I try to will it away.
And that dear reader is a crash.
No fiery infernos, no mangled metal, no broken bodies, not even a damn papercut. Just ten fingers with chewed fingernails, dancing across a field of white plastic keys. Thats not what it sounds like though. The first time a program of mine crashed, all I got was some gibberish telling me something was wrong, not even a damn beep. Sorely disillusioned, I opened my source code and began to 'debug'. There's something about the programmer mentality that seems to compel them to use very descriptive language in describing these rather mundane occurrences.
Scientists suffer from that too, except they started off in classical language mode, where everything was either Greek or Latin. All it achieved was to scare off generations of prospective scientists who probably switched to subjects that did not require learning another language. Then with a generation of scientists who grew up under the watchful eye of the media came the modern phase. With that transition, we suddenly went from calling everything either alpha or beta to naming genes 'sonic the hedgehog'! Something gives me the feeling a Tommy Vercetti gene is not too far away.
Chemists though in my opinion take the cake when it comes to ridiculous nomenclature and it's not just because I abhor the subject, a small simple and decidedly insignificant molecule may have a name of such humongous proportions it makes me break into a sweat just thinking about the possible structure. On the other hand one can hardly blame them, there are just so many things, if you are curious, you could look up AiB or alpha amino isobutyric acid.
Statisticians, now there's much I can say about this bunch of shifty number jugglers, except this is a subject that I'm slowly growing to love and I don't want to do anything to affect the relationship at this point. However since I am on the subject, this is one branch of science with more names than any other. Everything is someone's axiom or so-and-so's hypothesis, on top of that everyone is either French or Russian. Why the fuck don't we have a Bob's distribution, it sound way less intimidating that Poisson.
Jargon is inevitable, it's universal actually it's something that unifies almost every field of human endevour. If anyone recalls, in one of my last posts before I left Delhi, I wrote about my experiences with mechanic lingo., this is pretty much the same thing right? Except here it's a tad more formalized and just sound more respectable when coming out of the mouth of a well dressesed (err.. no, make that well paid... umm. No make it respected...(again only occasionally)) scientist.
6 comments:
Someone once programed the Mac I was working on at school to speak it's errors instead if it's annoying beep.
Being unaware of this I was very shocked to hear my computer belt out "There has been a error, I am a piece of shit"
I LMAO!!!!
Hey, you're back! :D
It's different when you're the one using the jargon and get along well in a conversation with fellow jargon users... but it's awful when you're the new kid who's not familiar with those jargons. That said, I loathe programming!
@Confusion, thats something that i would defiitely consider if i was a progmmer, making error messages less hostile.
Even now in the very basic pro gramming that I do, i try my best to make my error messages interesting, something like, 'abe saale theek se number daal nahi sakta kya?' (Cant you even enter the numbers straight?)
Linux allows us a lot of flexibility wrt. customizing our interaction, as a result a lot of us have made minor modifications to replace the more mundane commands with others, for instance a friend of mine replaced the command to delete folders from 'rm -rf' to 'devastate' he also has commands like 'destroy' and some more in malyalam (another indian language)
@Terra, i know what you're talking about, i get a real kick out of talking technical, our institute is in a campus that is full of these IT companies so sitting around, loudly discussing anything biological is enough to really intimidate people.
It’s my first blogversary! You are invited.
Man , its simply great. The way you have expressed your fear towards programming is remarkable. Seems that u read lots of novels.
Thanks rakesh, but you are wrong, I actually love programming, its just that linux error messages irritate me
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