All My Homies Hate CMake

Remember when coding meant wrestling with assembly and reading manuals thicker than your college textbook? Those 70s programmers didn't have Stack Overflow to cry on—they had biceps from carrying documentation and nightmares about memory allocation. Fast forward to modern times where we're practically coddled by interpreters that say "Aww, you forgot a semicolon? No worries, I'll pretend I didn't see that." The hardest thing we do now is decide which framework to abandon next month. Every time I have to touch low-level code, I silently thank the buff psychopaths who came before us. They weren't programmers—they were digital blacksmiths forging code with their bare hands.

The comic brilliantly captures the special relationship between developers and compilers. Our poor protagonist keeps recompiling the same broken code, expecting different results—the literal definition of madness according to that famous quote. Meanwhile, deep in the compiler's realm, it's portrayed as tiny workers loading error dynamite into a catapult, asking "He recompiled the same code again, should we stop?" Spoiler alert: they never stop. The compiler will happily keep launching those errors at you until you actually fix something. The "#define MADNESS" at the top is just *chef's kiss* perfect C preprocessor humor.

The classic trolley problem gets a programmer's twist! We've got two standards committees (TC39 for JavaScript and JTC1 for C++) tied to the nuclear option, while cancer and AIDS cures are on another track. Every developer knows the pain of dealing with language standards committees that seem to drag on forever with decisions that can blow up your codebase. The real moral dilemma: do you save humanity with medical breakthroughs, or do you finally put those endless committee meetings out of their misery? Let's be honest, we've all fantasized about nuking a standards meeting after implementing our 17th breaking change in a month.

Ah yes, the classic "let me solve this simple problem with the most unnecessarily complex solution possible" approach. Two mutually recursive functions to check if a number is even or odd? This has ChatGPT's fingerprints all over it. Meanwhile, every developer with more than 3 brain cells is screaming: return (n % 2 == 0); and calling it a day. This is what happens when you ask AI to "make it elegant" or "optimize this function." You get code that looks impressive in a technical interview but would get you publicly shamed in a code review.

Imagine being so traumatized by whitespace that you create an entire preprocessor just to use curly braces. That's peak developer rebellion right there! Python devs who secretly hate indentation finally have their savior—Bython—where they can write Python code with C-style braces while still telling everyone they're Python programmers. It's like wearing a disguise to your own language's party. The irony of printing "Python is awesome!" 10 times in a language specifically created to avoid Python's signature feature is just *chef's kiss*.

When your Windows kernel programming club accidentally creates a hex pun instead of a driver. That 0xDEE4 value is literally "DEE" followed by "4" in hex, while the variable names spell out "DEER deer; deer = *(DEER*)0xDEE4" – basically saying "they are dee-r-ly sorry" in code form. Every senior dev knows the real Windows driver development process involves 40% crying, 30% Stack Overflow, 20% whiskey, and 10% accidentally making dad jokes in your variable names that nobody will ever see... until they do.