C Is Uncontrollable

Imagine creating an entire programming language and then being asked to prove you know how to use it. The sheer audacity of HR making Ken Thompson—the literal father of C—take a C proficiency test is peak corporate bureaucracy. It's like asking Picasso to pass a coloring-within-the-lines test or making Einstein solve basic algebra before letting him work on relativity. "Sorry sir, company policy—everyone needs to demonstrate they can print 'Hello World' before accessing our codebase."

The paranoia is real. Nothing says "trust issues" like wrapping your calculator in parentheses just to make absolutely sure it calculates 2+3*4 as 2+(3*4) instead of (2+3)*4. That's the difference between getting 14 and 20, and I'm not taking any chances with my code logic. The calculator says it follows PEMDAS, but do I believe it? Absolutely not. Those extra parentheses are basically the programming equivalent of wearing both a belt AND suspenders.

The fastest way to summon a C++ developer to explain why you're wrong? Tweet "I love C++." Apparently, it takes exactly 34 minutes of trying to use the language before the Stockholm syndrome wears off and reality sets in. That tweet aged like milk left in a memory leak. The duality of every C++ programmer: loving it publicly while privately wondering why they chose a language where even printing "Hello World" requires sacrificing your firstborn to the template gods.

VS Code users staring blankly at their life choices while WebStorm, CLion, and DataGrip users are doing interpretive dance with their CPU usage. One IDE, zero thoughts. Three IDEs, zero available RAM. The duality of development.

Expectation: Writing elegant code with perfect structure and original logic. Reality: WHEEEZE *frantically searching through 2000 lines of code at 3am* "I FORGOR SEMICOLON" And then there's that one missing semicolon that keeps you awake for 4 days straight while your non-programmer friends think you're being dramatic. No, Chad, this isn't like when you "missed her" - this is psychological warfare between me and a punctuation mark that Satan himself invented.

The lifecycle of a C programmer in three Reddit posts: First: "Do you guys even like C?" - The honeymoon phase where you question your life choices after encountering your first segmentation fault. Then: "I'm beginning to like C" - Stockholm syndrome kicks in. You've accepted that memory management is your new unpaid part-time job. Finally: "How do you find libraries in C?" - The desperate plea of someone who's spent 6 hours trying to parse a JSON string without external help. Welcome to dependency hell, where the libraries are scarce and the documentation is optional.