tboorman
17/01/2007, 20:16
The Backbytes list of suggested epitaphs for programmers
In the January 15 2004 issue, we carried a small snippet from Simon Banks at Somerdata Ltd. His colleagues had been making up programmer epitaphs. 'The best so far is 'Not gone, just commented out', he says, 'but I'm sure your readers can do better’.
‘Can you?’ we asked, and fastened our seat belts, and received, in no particular order:
For all you old-timers:
This stone intentionally left blank (Tony Holroyd)
MYSELF.STATUS := VALUE(TERMINATED); (Barry Whenman – though we now accept this refers specifically to suicide)
SVC 32 (Deallocate)
SVC 31 (End of Job Dump - Leroy Smith)
SVC 13 (ABEND)
SVC 103 (XLATE - Martyn Cox)
SVC 3 (EXIT)
SVC 29 (SCRATCH)
SVC 9 (DELETE)
SVC 16 (PURGE)
Hoot when finished (strictly for programmers of the Ferranti Pegasus - Don Cobbett)
‘For those who want to just quietly disappear into dust, leaving no trace behind them, what about a few lines of BCPL – in fact ANY few lines of BCPL’ (Nick Clarke)
For the poets among you:
Connection Reset by Peer (Andrew Carpenter)
Upgrade Scheduled (Tim Welford)
Rem in peace (Peter Quinn)
Last instruction executed (Simon Parmenter)
Spawning last process (Simon Parmenter)
Finally outsourced (Simon Parmenter)
Infested with Worms (Ken Fisher)
Decompiling Peacefully (Tim Welford)
He came, he saw, he logged out (Andrew Carpenter)
Parsed Away (Steve Shepherd)
End Function (Tim Brown)
Set to Nothing (Roger Coult)
Connection to host lost (Chris Craven)
Waiting for the great engineer:
Not forgotten, Just Archived (Tim Welford)
Version 1 no longer supported (Nick Mead)
Tombstoned (WINS – Adrian D)
The last patch didn't work (Simon Parmenter)
Unscheduled downtime (Chris Craven)
Run-time licence expired (John Carrick smith)
In the sure an certain hope of a re-boot (Bob Foreman)
Host is down (Michael Aspaturian)
For ‘special’ personalities:
Left before the Testing started (Col Palmer)
Gone to meet my equal (Col Palmer)
You mean he was alive? (Roger Coult)
Dead right as always (Geoffrey Scott-Baker)
The byter...bit (Howard Gerlis)
If you are carving headstones to a budget:
Alt-F4 (Tim Parsons)
^Z (Tim Parsons)
</mick> (Andrew Leach) – alter name, as appropriate
} (Tim Brown)
~Mike (Mike Hogan)
BSODRIP (Simon Conti)
no Undo (Gary Cross)
^D (Marcus Davage)
!alive (Mik Towse)
alive— (Mik Towse)
is null (Mike Hanson)
to Void: return (Martin)
For specific religious beliefs:
Terminated but Stayed Resident (Tim Parsons)
Forever & Ever, Abend (Colin Rees)
do { purgatory } until heaven (Bruce Horrocks)
Close all programs and log on as a different user (John Brown – for Buddhists)
Obscure or best forgotten:
Gosub, no return (Dave Bolas)
Old programmers never die, they just de-compile (Jeremy Walker)
Returned to the heap (Mike Hogan)
$self = undef (Perl from ‘Cruise’)
Select * from living_people where name = 'Elaine Matthews' … 0 rows returned (Elaine Matthews)
End-of-file on communication channel (for Oracle users – Graham Bailey)
For the younger programmer:
A fatal error occurred (Vicky de Naeyer)
Unhandled Exception (Peter Barnfather)
Page 404 Error: Pulse not found (David Jones)
Non-living variable Mike cannot be referenced from a living context (Matt Williams)
Plain blue gravestone (Mark Aldworth)
Which leaves us to sign our epitaph:
. (Full stop – it’s SMTP’s end of message, as John Dron points out)
Remember, keep reading Computing (HYPERLINK "http://www.computing.co.uk/"www.computing.co.uk) and writing to Backbytes (HYPERLINK "mailto:back_bytes@vnu.co.uk"back_bytes@vnu.co.uk), because as one reader recently pointed out, if you didn’t we’d have nothing to write about.
See you on the back page
Tim Phillips
For Backbytes
In the January 15 2004 issue, we carried a small snippet from Simon Banks at Somerdata Ltd. His colleagues had been making up programmer epitaphs. 'The best so far is 'Not gone, just commented out', he says, 'but I'm sure your readers can do better’.
‘Can you?’ we asked, and fastened our seat belts, and received, in no particular order:
For all you old-timers:
This stone intentionally left blank (Tony Holroyd)
MYSELF.STATUS := VALUE(TERMINATED); (Barry Whenman – though we now accept this refers specifically to suicide)
SVC 32 (Deallocate)
SVC 31 (End of Job Dump - Leroy Smith)
SVC 13 (ABEND)
SVC 103 (XLATE - Martyn Cox)
SVC 3 (EXIT)
SVC 29 (SCRATCH)
SVC 9 (DELETE)
SVC 16 (PURGE)
Hoot when finished (strictly for programmers of the Ferranti Pegasus - Don Cobbett)
‘For those who want to just quietly disappear into dust, leaving no trace behind them, what about a few lines of BCPL – in fact ANY few lines of BCPL’ (Nick Clarke)
For the poets among you:
Connection Reset by Peer (Andrew Carpenter)
Upgrade Scheduled (Tim Welford)
Rem in peace (Peter Quinn)
Last instruction executed (Simon Parmenter)
Spawning last process (Simon Parmenter)
Finally outsourced (Simon Parmenter)
Infested with Worms (Ken Fisher)
Decompiling Peacefully (Tim Welford)
He came, he saw, he logged out (Andrew Carpenter)
Parsed Away (Steve Shepherd)
End Function (Tim Brown)
Set to Nothing (Roger Coult)
Connection to host lost (Chris Craven)
Waiting for the great engineer:
Not forgotten, Just Archived (Tim Welford)
Version 1 no longer supported (Nick Mead)
Tombstoned (WINS – Adrian D)
The last patch didn't work (Simon Parmenter)
Unscheduled downtime (Chris Craven)
Run-time licence expired (John Carrick smith)
In the sure an certain hope of a re-boot (Bob Foreman)
Host is down (Michael Aspaturian)
For ‘special’ personalities:
Left before the Testing started (Col Palmer)
Gone to meet my equal (Col Palmer)
You mean he was alive? (Roger Coult)
Dead right as always (Geoffrey Scott-Baker)
The byter...bit (Howard Gerlis)
If you are carving headstones to a budget:
Alt-F4 (Tim Parsons)
^Z (Tim Parsons)
</mick> (Andrew Leach) – alter name, as appropriate
} (Tim Brown)
~Mike (Mike Hogan)
BSODRIP (Simon Conti)
no Undo (Gary Cross)
^D (Marcus Davage)
!alive (Mik Towse)
alive— (Mik Towse)
is null (Mike Hanson)
to Void: return (Martin)
For specific religious beliefs:
Terminated but Stayed Resident (Tim Parsons)
Forever & Ever, Abend (Colin Rees)
do { purgatory } until heaven (Bruce Horrocks)
Close all programs and log on as a different user (John Brown – for Buddhists)
Obscure or best forgotten:
Gosub, no return (Dave Bolas)
Old programmers never die, they just de-compile (Jeremy Walker)
Returned to the heap (Mike Hogan)
$self = undef (Perl from ‘Cruise’)
Select * from living_people where name = 'Elaine Matthews' … 0 rows returned (Elaine Matthews)
End-of-file on communication channel (for Oracle users – Graham Bailey)
For the younger programmer:
A fatal error occurred (Vicky de Naeyer)
Unhandled Exception (Peter Barnfather)
Page 404 Error: Pulse not found (David Jones)
Non-living variable Mike cannot be referenced from a living context (Matt Williams)
Plain blue gravestone (Mark Aldworth)
Which leaves us to sign our epitaph:
. (Full stop – it’s SMTP’s end of message, as John Dron points out)
Remember, keep reading Computing (HYPERLINK "http://www.computing.co.uk/"www.computing.co.uk) and writing to Backbytes (HYPERLINK "mailto:back_bytes@vnu.co.uk"back_bytes@vnu.co.uk), because as one reader recently pointed out, if you didn’t we’d have nothing to write about.
See you on the back page
Tim Phillips
For Backbytes