Yesterday I Discovered The Mutable Keyword

Ah, the transformation that C++ brings to a programmer's soul. While other substances merely alter your appearance, C++ mutates your very being into something unrecognizable – half human, half deep-sea nightmare with bulging eyes and too many teeth. Ten years of memory management violations, pointer arithmetic, and template metaprogramming will do that to you. The rest just destroy your body, but C++ corrupts your mind until you start seeing everything as poorly encapsulated objects with questionable inheritance hierarchies. And yet we keep coming back for more. Masochists, the lot of us.

Ah yes, the classic "let me solve this simple problem with the most unnecessarily complex solution possible" approach. Two mutually recursive functions to check if a number is even or odd? This has ChatGPT's fingerprints all over it. Meanwhile, every developer with more than 3 brain cells is screaming: return (n % 2 == 0); and calling it a day. This is what happens when you ask AI to "make it elegant" or "optimize this function." You get code that looks impressive in a technical interview but would get you publicly shamed in a code review.

That moment when your entire career hangs in the balance of a color-coded gauge slowly filling with red. Nothing quite matches the suspense of watching your terminal like it's the season finale of your favorite show. The compilation starts all green and happy, then the yellows creep in, and suddenly you're bargaining with the compiler gods: "Just warnings, please just warnings..." But deep down you know those errors are coming. They always do. It's like watching a horror movie where you're both the victim and the monster who wrote the code.

Ah yes, the classic "it's 2025 but we're coding like it's 1989" scenario. Some professor is still forcing students to declare all variables at the top of the function like we're writing ANSI C89 standard code. Meanwhile, the variable name when_will_they_get_advanced = 0 is the silent scream of every CS student trapped in academic time capsules. The real joke is that while industry moved on decades ago, academia still thinks the C compiler from the Gulf War era is "cutting edge." Nothing prepares you for the real world like learning techniques that were outdated when dinosaurs roamed Silicon Valley.

When your Windows kernel programming club accidentally creates a hex pun instead of a driver. That 0xDEE4 value is literally "DEE" followed by "4" in hex, while the variable names spell out "DEER deer; deer = *(DEER*)0xDEE4" – basically saying "they are dee-r-ly sorry" in code form. Every senior dev knows the real Windows driver development process involves 40% crying, 30% Stack Overflow, 20% whiskey, and 10% accidentally making dad jokes in your variable names that nobody will ever see... until they do.

Finally, a professor who speaks our language! The ultimate office hours protocol written in C-style syntax. Notice how there's no exception handling - just like real professors when you ask for an extension. And that Deal_With_Rejection() function? I've implemented that one countless times after code reviews. The best part is the default fallback: no matter what happens, you're probably getting a Come_Back_Later return value anyway. Ten years of engineering experience has taught me this algorithm is frighteningly accurate for human interaction in general.