Programming history Memes

This is a masterclass in legacy systems biting back! The tweet explains how Social Security runs on COBOL (a programming language from the 1950s) where dates are stored using the ISO 8601 standard with an epoch starting 150 years ago (1875). So when a date is unknown, it defaults to zero, which COBOL interprets as 1875. The humor comes from Donald Trump Jr. misinterpreting Elon Musk's comment about this technical quirk as evidence of "150-year-old people collecting Social Security" – when it's actually just a database returning default epoch values! It's the perfect intersection of ancient programming languages, government systems that never get updated, and non-technical people drawing wild conclusions. Mainframe programmers are cackling while pouring another cup of coffee right now.

Remember when coding meant wrestling with assembly and reading manuals thicker than your college textbook? Those 70s programmers didn't have Stack Overflow to cry on—they had biceps from carrying documentation and nightmares about memory allocation. Fast forward to modern times where we're practically coddled by interpreters that say "Aww, you forgot a semicolon? No worries, I'll pretend I didn't see that." The hardest thing we do now is decide which framework to abandon next month. Every time I have to touch low-level code, I silently thank the buff psychopaths who came before us. They weren't programmers—they were digital blacksmiths forging code with their bare hands.

Dad jokes and programming puns - the ultimate combo that keeps marriages strong! While she thinks he's daydreaming about another woman, he's actually plotting how naming his son "Programming" would make him the "father of programming" - a title otherwise reserved for legends like Charles Babbage. The recursion in this joke is just *chef's kiss*. Peak dad humor meets computer science in one glorious pun that probably cost him cuddles for a week.

The technical pedant has entered the chat! Nothing screams "I'm fun at parties" like correcting people about character encoding standards at an ASCII art gathering. That person standing in the corner made of slashes and asterisks is silently judging everyone who casually calls it "ASCII art" when it should be "ISO-8859 art" — because obviously that's what keeps them up at night. It's the digital equivalent of being the guy who corrects people saying "Frankenstein" when they mean "Frankenstein's monster." Congratulations on being technically correct — the most insufferable kind of correct!

The glorious fall of programmer dignity, visualized in perfect clarity. Once upon a time, developers were digital demigods who wrote code without AI crutches, built entire games in Assembly (because apparently suffering builds character), crafted code that literally sent humans to the moon, and performed memory management wizardry by hand. Fast forward to today's pathetic reality: developers frantically Googling how to center a div (still an unsolved mystery of computer science), begging ChatGPT to fix basic syntax errors, getting permanently trapped in Vim like it's some kind of developer Hotel California, and introducing three new bugs while fixing one—a net negative contribution to humanity. The evolution from muscle-bound coding titans to helpless brain-worms perfectly captures how we've traded actual knowledge for dependency on tools. Progress!

Back in the 60s, programmers were literally PUNCHING CODE into cards by hand! 🤯 The person in the image is holding up punch cards with the caption "COMPILERS TOOK MY JOB" - it's basically the original "robots are stealing our jobs" but for coding! Before compilers existed, humans had to manually convert code into machine-readable formats. Then BAM! Compilers showed up and were like "I got this" and an entire profession vanished faster than free pizza at a hackathon! Those punch card operators never saw it coming!