The Office Hours Protocol

Looking at this dependency graph is like watching a murder mystery where every header file is both a victim and a suspect. The C++ include nightmare on full display here—a tangled web that would make even the most hardened senior dev reach for the whiskey drawer. Circular dependencies, cascading includes, and enough arrows to start a small archery business. And somewhere in this mess, a junior dev is about to add another header file and bring the whole 45-minute compile time to its knees. Remember kids, this is why we have forward declarations and precompiled headers. But who am I kidding? We'll all be debugging this spaghetti next sprint anyway.

The build tool hierarchy according to C++ developers! BSD Make gets a mild "meh" reaction. GNU Make earns a fancy tuxedo upgrade and approving smile. But NMAKE? That's Microsoft's Windows build tool that makes Pooh show his teeth in pure rage. It's the compiler equivalent of stepping on a LEGO while debugging a memory leak at 3AM. The perfect visual representation of why developers would rather rewrite their entire codebase than deal with Visual Studio's native build system.

To normal humans, "I❤️U" is a sweet declaration of love written on a steamy mirror. To programmers, it's a terrifying logical NOT operator followed by a comparison between I and U. That's basically saying "NOT I equals U" which is either a syntax error or an existential crisis depending on your compiler. The sheer horror on the CS person's face says it all - they can't enjoy romantic gestures without mentally parsing them as Boolean operations. It's the curse of seeing ! and immediately thinking "bang operator" instead of "someone's excited about love."

The C++ developer dreams of social interaction while the Rust developer's one human encounter per week consists of checking the mailbox and getting told to learn Rust. Introverts who code in Rust don't even make it past the mailbox before retreating back to their memory-safe caves. Five minutes of socialization? Better mark that as unsafe{} and come back next week.

The C++ Olympic gold medalist celebrates victory in the first 5 panels, only to get absolutely destroyed by Rust in the final frame. Classic story of our industry - spend decades mastering pointer arithmetic and manual memory management, then some new language comes along with a borrow checker and suddenly you're obsolete. C++17 promised better memory safety features, but let's be honest - it's like putting a band-aid on a chainsaw wound. Meanwhile Rust sits on the podium smugly preventing segfaults at compile time while every other garbage-collected language watches from second place. Ten years of debugging dangling pointers and suddenly I'm supposed to learn ownership semantics? Fine, I'll update my resume.

When someone asks you to say "hi" in your mother language and you respond with a C++ code snippet... This is peak programmer energy! The person literally speaks in code, treating C++ as their native tongue. I bet they dream in algorithms and have debugging nightmares. This is what happens when you spend more time with compilers than with actual humans. Their social skills might be deprecated, but their syntax is impeccable!