"Programming is Hard when you have Poop for Brains" by Chuck Moulton


Two Heads Are Better Than
 One Head With No Brains

            by Chuck Moulton

In Eiffel programming class today we were trying to write an object-oriented program that would pick lottery numbers. My teacher has a tendency to go beserk when we mock standards, so class was particularly funny. When discussing possible ways to return balls and remove them from the list, we enflamed him and sat back to watch him rant:

“You would need to invoke the remove routine in the linked list of balls. The command you should use is ‘balls.remove’.” He wrote it on the board. “But what if someone tried to delete a ball before he selected it? You have to anticipate possible errors like this and write routines to deal with them so the program doesn’t crash with an exception. Trust me, it is very helpful when debugging. Here, we’ll write a nice little conditional statement to check if the selected item is off the list.” He quickly erased the board and scribbled:


   if not balls.off then   
   	balls.remove   
   end – if

         There, problem solved. Confused, I raised my hand and inquired, “Why would you check for errors if the feature is private and you’re writing all the implementation? Couldn’t you just NOT make that mistake when you’re calling your routine?”

         My professor stared at me, annoyed. “What if you’re working in teams and someone else is writing the impleplementation for the invocation?”

         “...but why would you program with someone who is that stupid?”

         “Well, often in real-world situations you are forced to program in groups. Suppose someone on your team can’t code for [poop]? Your project is judged based the final product, so you need to compensate for his inadequacies.”

         “Can’t you just put a comment in your code that says, ‘Don’t use my routine if you are a complete idiot’?”

         “It’s much better to write a nice little message telling people what the problem is. Here:” He erased the “end – if” and inserted the words:


   else
	io.put_string( “You failed to select an item before you asked me to delete it.” )   
   end – if

“Why?!” I persisted. “What is the point of doubling the size of your program with mountains of useless error-handling routines?”

“Well, what do you propose? Just ignore the problem?” He erased the else statement and paused for dramatic effect, then became very excited. “No, we can mock the programmer!” He made a new else statement:


   else
   	io.put_string( “You’re a moron.  Stop using my routines.” )   
   end -- if

“Or better yet…” He bagan to laugh maniacally. “We’ll return garbage!” He replaced the 'else' statement with:


   else
   	return 7   
   end –if

“This’ll confuse him for hours! All of his lotto numbers will be 7’s! HAHAhhAHAHaHAhA!!! No no, wait, we need to punish him!!! Let’s format his hard drive every time he passes us bad input!! Yeah!!!!! Hey, hold on, he won’t know why his hard drive is formatting itself. We need to send him a message first! We’ll do this:” He wrote:


   io.put_string( “There is no list item selected.  I’m formatting your hard drive.” )

“That’ll teach ‘em!” Suddenly he changed his demeanor and snapped at the class, “No, everyone, that’s BAD PROGRAMMING! You need to follow standards.”

So I said, "But it’s Eiffel, for God’s sake. Why would anyone ever program in Eiffel?" In response, his face turned completely red and he started shaking like he was having an epileptic seizure, but we all knew he was just mad. Then his head exploded. That’s all I have to say about that.

Chuck Moulton is a revolutionary economist who has envisioned a way to stabilize our economy and counteract the ills of the capitalist system. When he looks at our stock market and federal reserve board, he sees a misguided attempt the people have made to pretend they can control the almighty dollar. "When the major monetary policy decisions are made by fallible hamans instead of pure ecomonic principles, namely mathematical formulas," Chuck argues, "the value of money is necessarily unstable and subject to the arbitrary whims of an elite few." His analysis was far too thorough and objective to be ignored by expert economists; however, they choose to do so anyway -- until the big crash of '97 forced them to reevalutate their priorities. They decided that it was better to embrace a new and promising tomorrow than to foolishly hold on to outdated traditions. Therefore, effective immediately, the stock market and fedral reserve will each be replaced with a thousand Ryan Wangs conducting random games of chance (i.e. rock-paper-scissors).* The laws of probability dictate that as a result prices will quickly gravitate towards their ideal free-market amount and the value of a dollar will no longer be in a constant state of flux. These conditions all occur automagically without the need for expensive computers or pesky open market operations. To recognize this creative idea and others, Chuck was awarded the nobel prize in Economics in 1997. He plans to spend the next few years researching game theory and the largely unknown underground economy (undercover, of course). In fact, he coined the word "jokai," which is now used world-wide as a signal of nonconformity.

*Note: This is all, of course, in due respect to Ryan Wang, his belief that Rock-Paper-Scissors is not a random game of chance, and the tripartite nature of life.

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