Main function Memes

The beautiful irony of good software engineering: you spend hours architecting elegant helper functions, utility classes, and abstraction layers, only to end up with a main function that basically says "run()" and "exit()". It's like building an entire factory just to press one button. But here's the thing—that massive script book contains all the actual logic, error handling, and complexity, while your main function gets to be the minimalist zen master that just orchestrates everything. Clean code principles at their finest: your main should read like poetry while your implementation looks like a legal document. The ratio never lies though. If your main function is longer than your helper code, you're either writing a script or committing crimes against abstraction.

You know you're doing something right when your entire script is a massive tome of spaghetti code, while your main function is just a tiny pamphlet that says "run everything." Classic procedural programming where you dump 3000 lines into one file and then have a main() that's basically just "yep, do the thing." Meanwhile, OOP developers are over here with their 47 classes, 12 interfaces, 3 abstract factories, and a main function that's somehow even smaller because it just instantiates one god object that does everything anyway. Different approach, same energy. The real joke? Both camps think they're doing it the "right way" while the functional programming folks are laughing in pure functions.

The gradual descent into programming madness: First panel: Rust's clean, explicit entry point. Simple. Elegant. Second panel: C/C++'s classic int main(). Familiar territory. Third panel: Python's cryptic "__name__ == '__main__'" check that makes you question your life choices. Fourth panel: The existential crisis that follows when you realize you've been staring at different entry point syntaxes for so long that you've forgotten what sunlight feels like. The four horsemen of "how the hell do I start this program again?"