One Asterisk Away From Existential Crisis

The Rust evangelism strike force claims another victim! Some poor soul dared to mention they're still using C/C++ in 2022, and now they're being lectured about Rust's memory safety features while their friends slowly back away. Classic language elitism in its natural habitat – because nothing says "I'm a modern developer" like making others feel bad about their tech stack choices. Meanwhile, the C++ devs are too busy fighting memory leaks to defend themselves.

Regular developers measure performance in milliseconds or microseconds because that's what modern tools show them. Meanwhile, the true optimization psychopaths are counting individual CPU clock cycles like it's 1982. They're the ones rewriting entire functions in assembly just to save 3 cycles in a loop that runs twice a day. The difference between "fast enough" and "I need to know exactly how many nanoseconds each instruction takes."

Ah yes, the sacred programmer ritual of typing "return" correctly on the first try. Top panel: Rejecting the boring, correct "return" keyword like it's some kind of personal insult. Bottom panel: Enthusiastically embracing every possible misspelling—retrun, reunt, reutn, reutnr, erunt—like they're long-lost friends. The true mark of a senior developer isn't knowing design patterns or algorithms—it's how creatively you can butcher simple keywords while typing at 100 WPM with the confidence of someone who definitely didn't just break the entire codebase.

Oh snap! This is Boolean variables in their natural habitat - doing the splits between TRUE and FALSE with absolutely no middle ground! Just like this person on the subway bench stretching into oblivion, booleans only know two states: completely true or utterly false. No "kinda true" or "sorta false" allowed in their binary world! They're the drama queens of programming - always dealing in absolutes while the rest of us float-type variables are just trying to exist somewhere in the decimal points of life.

The dark magic of build systems strikes again! Kitware, the company behind CMake, somehow claims 24 million users despite no one ever voluntarily identifying as a "CMake user." It's like that moment when you realize you've been drafted into an army you never signed up for. The Saruman imagery is perfect because using CMake feels exactly like staring into a mysterious orb that shows you cryptic error messages while slowly draining your will to live. We all just wanted to compile our code, but instead we're part of some grand arcane ritual.

The duality of programmer brain function is hilariously accurate here. For regular variables, it's absolute chaos - fighting over whether to use temp , result , or just mash the keyboard with myVar . But for iteration variables? The council has convened and unanimously decreed: "We shall use 'i' and nothing else." The formal ceremony of loop counter naming has remained unchanged since the ancient days of FORTRAN. Bonus points if you graduate to j for nested loops while feeling incredibly sophisticated.