Hollywood Computing: Programming

[brokenhut]

Programmers in the movies get a pretty raw deal, I think. For a start, it’s very rare for them to use any real programming languages. Most of what they seem to do falls into two categories:

1. Typing at very high speeds while screeds of random alphanumeric characters fly up the screen. See The Matrix for examples of such silliness.
2. Manipulate 3D

Comments

[anonymous]

Having been reading a lot of William Gibson over the Easter weekend, I feel lots of Hollywood depictions of computing are rather coloured by attempts to interpret his (and other cyberpunk) early work (Neuromancer, Count Zero, Mona Lisa Overdrive). Which all paint a rather dystopian technology-centered world. Certainly the descriptions of firewalls as "ice" are very reminiscent of many movies' attempts to display how a virus might work.

Lawrence

[zootm]

Maybe they're writing in APL?

[brokenhut]

APL: programming for perl users who have found the unicode charmap...

[zootm]

Haha.

I love this quote:
APL, in which you can write a program to simulate shuffling a deck of cards and then dealing them out to several players in four characters, none of which appear on a standard keyboard.

It's made all the better by the fact that on the Wikipedia page it's followed by this completely unnecessary extension:
It should be noted that the quote above is not literally true. All APL algorithms that shuffle a deck of cards involve the expression 52?52 to generate the numbers from 1 through 52 in random order. That's more than four characters right there, and the question mark symbol does appear on standard keyboards.