The Perfect Sorting Algorithm

That moment when you dive into Haskell and suddenly realize your entire programming existence has been a lie. "Where is the loop?" is the functional programming equivalent of a fish asking "where is the bicycle?" Pure functional languages don't do loops—they do recursion and higher-order functions like it's no big deal. Meanwhile, you're standing there like John Travolta, coat in hand, wondering if you accidentally downloaded a programming language or an abstract math thesis. Welcome to Haskell, where imperative programmers come to question their reality.

That moment when you realize you've been in this industry so long that basic concepts have become ancient artifacts. The look of existential dread when a freshman asks what a zip file is... like watching someone question why we still use wheels on cars. Nothing makes you feel more like a digital dinosaur than explaining compression algorithms to kids who grew up with unlimited cloud storage. And here I am, remembering when we passed code around on actual floppy disks.

The four stages of accidental programming genius: First, the dread of facing a complex feature from scratch. You know, that moment when you stare at the requirements doc and contemplate a career change. Then somehow, fueled by panic and caffeine, you bang out the entire implementation in one day. Not even sure how that happened. But wait—it actually works on the first try? No 17-hour debugging session? No StackOverflow spiritual journey? And the final ascension to godhood: discovering your code handles edge cases you didn't even know existed. You've transcended mere programming and entered the realm of cosmic accident. Your code is better than you are.

The DRAMATIC DECLINE of a CS student's soul in four horrifying acts! 😱 Year 1: Look at this precious innocent baby printing "Hello World" with the enthusiasm of someone who thinks they'll be the next Zuckerberg. ADORABLE. They have NO IDEA what's coming. Year 2: Reality starts to set in. That face says "I've seen things... terrible things... like trying to balance binary trees at 3 AM while questioning my life choices." Year 3: COMPLETE PSYCHOLOGICAL BREAKDOWN. "I wanna go home" is code for "I've forgotten what sunlight feels like and my dreams are in Python syntax." Year 4: The final transformation! When your degree crushes your soul so thoroughly that you abandon all hope of a traditional career and decide to become a YouTube coding guru instead. THE CIRCLE OF DESPAIR IS COMPLETE!

The eternal battle between descriptive variable naming and mathematical brevity! Your pair programmer whips out for (int i = 0; i followed by double λ = 0.5; and int Δt = 10; and you're suddenly transported back to college nightmares. Clean code zealots clutch their copies of "Clean Code" while math-heavy programmers argue "but θ is OBVIOUSLY the angle parameter!" The true horror isn't the single letters—it's realizing you'll need to decipher this cryptic alphabet soup during the 3 AM production bug six months later when the original author is vacationing in Tahiti.

The beautiful art of recursive self-torture. The function why_are_you_hitting_yourself() calls itself inside its own definition, creating an infinite loop of self-abuse that would make any compiler cry. Then main() joins the party by calling it too. It's the programming equivalent of that childhood game where your older sibling grabs your hand and makes you slap your own face while asking "why are you hitting yourself?" Except in this case, the function is both the bully and the victim. Infinite recursion without a base case - because who needs stack memory anyway?