Drew Clinkenbeard

The other day the following comic from XKCD struck me as amusing:

It also made me think, the last gift I got my mother was a robot. I bought my mother a roomba and now she has a robot roaming free in her home. I may be working with a team designing a robotic soccer team. My friends mother was buying digital picture frames for her parents. We live in a science fiction world and NO ONE NOTICED. We all carry communicators. I am laying in bed typing this on a machine about 10000 times more powerful than what sent men to the moon. If the allies had this computer during WWII Hitler would have been dead,,,, crap godwins law.

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So I am a computer science major, as such everyone expects me to love to program. Let me set things straight right now: I don’t. Well not really. I did enjoy writing a driver in perl that initiated a bunch of sorting algorithms and compared their times. I also like learning new languages I am currently working on learning a bit of Python. Python creeps me out because it does not use end of line characters, at least not that I have discovered yet.
example: printing Hello world!
perl:

print "\nhello world\n";

c:

main() { printf("\nhello world!\n"); }

python:

print '\nhello world\n'

GAA!! Notice the complete lack of semi-colon! As if this oft mis understood piece of punctuation hasn’t been trimmed from the english language enough now we must remove it from programing as well?! What will the future coders of America complain about?! Do you know how many hours of my life have been spent hunting for the missing semi-colon? or the misplaced semicolon? (interestingly enough demi, semi, and hemi can all mean the same thing),,, So I guess good riddance to the foul thing.

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