Old Possum's Book of Pragmatic Programmers

'Managing programmers is like trying to herd cats' - Ellen Ullman, Close to the Machine.

Author’s note: This month I had originally determined to produce for you some poems parodying the style of T S Eliot’s well-known and well-loved volume Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats. However, when I went back and reread the book, I discovered that in truth I don’t much like Eliot’s poems – they are sloppily written and affectedly sentimental, eccentric yet charmless. Whimsically naming a character ‘Jennyanydots’ may impress Lord Lloyd Weber, but it doesn’t cut the ice with me. Problem: if you don’t like the original, you can’t do a decent parody.

Here instead, then, are parodies of four poems that I do admire. But the headline and introduction, though now meaningless, seemed too good to change. So I didn’t – VS.

Sonnet 233 Mhz

My laptop’s size is nothing like a book;
Unlike my bag her weight drags down my arm;
If a mouse is like a digit, her pad’s a foot;
A fast disk like a storm, her drive is calm.
The latest bat’tries charge in half an hour –
In half a week my laptop cannot do it.
The best of keyboards click and clack with power;
Her tiny keyboard squidges like Mum’s suet.
To change some RAM should really be a cinch
Two dozen screws keep hers from prying eyes.
Through a mesh of blurry pixels, at a pinch,
I can discover where each fresh fault lies.
     One question irks me ev’ry day anew,
     How come this junk got five stars in review?

The Uncertainty of the Programmer

var
  i : TPoet;
begin
  Assert(i.fondness(bananas) >= VERY);

var
  i : TBananas;
begin
  Assert(i.fondness(poet) >= VERY);

type
  TPoet = class(TBananas) 
  end;
var
  i : TPoet;
begin  
  Assert(i.fondness >= VERY);

  i.i.fondness(poet);
  bananas >= VERY;

  if fondness(bananas = i) then
    if i then
       poet := VERY;

  Assert(poet.bananas);
  if fondness then
    if VERY then
      {nothing};

  Assert(i = poet.bananas);
  Assert(i.fondness(VERY));

  if bananas.fondness > VERY
    Assert(i in bananas);
  if i is TPoet then
    {nothing};

Ah. I see you too are having difficulties getting up to speed with CodeRush’s keyboard templates.

(Sorry. That one was just for Delphi heads.)

Porting an old library late one evening

Whose C this is I think I know:
I made it many moons ago
When I was young and full of passion
And K&R was all the fashion.

Strange beauty here. I see the traces
In overhanging curly braces
Of long-forgotten big ideas
My hopes and thoughts of former years.

My little Compaq stirs her drive
As if to say, Hey! Look alive
For goodness sake pull out your finger
We do not have the time to linger.

I close the file with little zest.
I’ve many modules yet to test,
And code to write before I rest,
And code to write before I rest.

Night Mail

This is the email crossing the router,
A transient blip on its trouble shooter,

Email for Harry, email for Tom,
Mail for dot uk and mail for dot com.

The data fly past, ip* in each packet
The network is loaded but this lot won’t crack it.

A glut from a recalcitrant mailing list
Which despite ‘unsubscribe’ will still not desist,

An adulterer’s hint to her partner in crime,
Some idiot’s Word file, bloated with MIME,

A letter to Feedback about Radio Four,
A rambling flame from some Christian bore,

A batch of blue jokes laced with tetragram**,
A job application, and spam spam spam.

But there’s rings on its fingers and bells on its toes,
Email spreads joy wherever it goes –

For surely the hardiest cynic can’t fail
To thrill at the popup: ‘You have new mail’.

 
*Pronounced ‘eye-pee’, obviously.
** A four letter word. The stress falls on first and last syllables. At least, it does in this poem.

Rampant self-indulgence

Happy Birthday to me,
Happy Birthday to me,
I’ve been writing this column on and off for ten years now,
Happy Birthday to me.