What Can You Say When Speed Costs 990 Lines

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."

Billion-dollar GPU vs. one efficient Japanese coder? Not even a contest. While we're all chasing fancy hardware to run our bloated, framework-heavy code, Japanese game devs are out here making masterpieces run on calculators. Monster Hunter and Elden Ring weren't built with 16 layers of abstraction and 800MB of node_modules. The rest of us are like "I need a quantum computer to center this div" while they're squeezing every last cycle from hardware like it's still the PS2 era. Efficiency is apparently a lost art everywhere except Japan.

The classic "let me solve this with threads" syndrome that haunts our industry. It's like watching someone try to untangle Christmas lights by adding more Christmas lights to the mix. Multithreading: the only programming solution that multiplies your problems with mathematical precision. One problem becomes two, then four, then eight—exponential regret growth! The worst part? That smug "I know!" moment before everything falls apart. It's the computational equivalent of saying "hold my beer" right before attempting a backflip off a roof.

The evolution of programming weapons, perfectly illustrated. Assembler is your basic knife with a scope—minimal but precise. C is just a bullet with a hammer, because who needs safety features? C++ straps five different weapons together with duct tape and calls it "object-oriented." And then there's Python, which looks like it was designed by a committee of drunk engineers who couldn't decide what they wanted, so they included everything. "Yes, it's inefficient and ridiculous looking, but look how fast I can deploy it!"

The most controversial statement in programming isn't politics or tabs vs spaces—it's whether arrays should start at 0 or 1. This poor woman asked for the truth and got hit with "arrays should start at 1"—a statement so blasphemous to most programmers it's worth crying over. Meanwhile, Lua, MATLAB, and R programmers are nodding in agreement while the rest of us clutch our zero-indexed pearls in horror. The real tragedy? She was probably expecting something less traumatic... like "I deleted the production database."

That special moment of existential dread when you realize your "complex bug" was just you forgetting to hit the compile button. Eight hours of your life, gone. Staring at error messages that don't exist. Questioning your career choices. Contemplating a new life as a goat farmer. And all because your sleep-deprived brain forgot to perform the most basic step in the development process. The compiler wasn't even given a chance to judge your code—it was just sitting there, waiting for you to press a button. Pure genius.