Compiler Flag

So you spent three weeks learning trigonometry, diving into DDA algorithms, and debugging why your walls look like a Salvador Dalí painting, only to realize John Carmack did this in 1992 on hardware that had less computing power than your smart toaster. And he did it while probably eating pizza and writing assembly like it was a casual Tuesday. The "box of triangles" bit hits different when you realize modern game engines abstract all this pain away with their fancy rendering pipelines, but back then? Carmack was literally casting rays and doing trigonometric calculations per pixel to fake 3D in Wolfenstein 3D. No GPU acceleration, no Unity, no "just import Three.js"—just raw math and the will to make demons shootable. Meanwhile, you're here in 2024 with Stack Overflow, ChatGPT, and 64GB of RAM, still struggling to get your raycaster to not crash when you look at a corner. Humbling stuff.

The eternal civil war of code formatting! On the red side: the chaotic rebel who puts opening braces on the same line as the function declaration. On the blue side: the structured purist who insists the opening brace deserves its own dedicated line. This syntactical holy war has crashed more team meetings than null pointer exceptions. The tabs vs. spaces debate might have siblings now, but this brace placement battle has been dividing dev teams since K&R style faced off against Allman style in the coding thunderdome. Your IDE's auto-formatter is the only thing preventing actual bloodshed at this point.

The AUDACITY of someone asking if C and C++ are friends! 💅 Honey, that's like asking if your ex and their upgraded version get along! C is standing there like "Absolutely NOT" while C++ is all "Actually, I can use everything they own, so... yes!" The DRAMA! C++ literally took C's syntax, added object-oriented fabulousness, and then had the NERVE to claim compatibility! It's the programming language equivalent of stealing someone's wardrobe and then saying "we share clothes!" The relationship status? It's complicated, darling!

Microsoft's ambitious plan to nuke every line of C/C++ from their codebase by 2030 using AI is giving major "we'll rewrite it in Rust next quarter" vibes, except with a budget that could buy a small country. The highlighted goals are absolutely wild: eliminate decades of battle-tested code and somehow have 1 engineer rewrite 1 million lines in 1 month. Because nothing says "stable production environment" like AI-generated code at scale, right? The real kicker here is the confidence level. They're building "powerful infrastructure" and "scalable graphs" to accomplish what they themselves call a "previously unimaginable task." Translation: they're throwing AI at a problem that probably doesn't need solving, but hey, it's 2024 and if you're not using AI for everything, are you even a tech company? Can't wait to see the bug reports when AI decides to "optimize" some critical kernel code.

Ah, the classic programmer double entendre. What we're looking at is [2b | !2b] followed by "That is the expression." It's Shakespeare's famous "to be or not to be" dilemma rewritten as a bitwise OR operation. The "2b" is hexadecimal (base 16) for 43 in decimal, and the exclamation mark represents logical NOT. So you're literally performing a bitwise OR between "to be" and "not to be" in code. The punchline is the perfect deadpan delivery: "That is the expression." Because, well, it literally is an expression in programming terms. Whoever came up with this probably felt extremely clever while their coworkers groaned audibly.

Left: Game dev crying because Unity changed their pricing model and now they need a second mortgage to make a 2D platformer. Right: The bearded C++ developer who's been writing their own engine since 2003 and still hasn't released a game, but boy does that skybox rendering look crisp. It's the classic tradeoff - use a commercial engine and get destroyed by licensing fees, or build your own and get destroyed by feature creep. Either way, your game is never shipping.