Hollywood's dumbest depictions of code

By at 8:53 pm Thursday, Dec 7

Drivl's list of "What code DOESN'T do in real life (that it does in the movies)" should be turned into a stencil and spraypainted on alternating sidewalk squares leading up to the main gates of every movie studio in LA:
1. Code does not move
In films and television code is always sailing across the screen at incredible speeds; it's presented as an indecipherable stream of letters and numbers that make perfect sense to the programmer but dumbfound everyone else. I understand that to the non-savvy person the abilities of a programmer might seem amazingly complex, but do they honestly think we can read shit that isn't sitting still? It'd be like trying to read six newspapers flying around in a tornado. Sure, I can watch a kernel compile, tail a log file, or simply monitor the scrolling output of a program - but the most value I get out of those activities is when execution stops and I can actually scroll back to read what the hell happened (unless the output was going slow enough I could read it as it happened)...

4. Code is not three dimensional
Remember in "hackers" when the gibson is depicted as a three dimensional city that the hackers must navigate through? Bullshit! We may use a dash of color in our shell to make things a bit clearer, but last I checked my terminal app doesn't require OpenGL. I'm working here, bitches - I'm not playing quake.

Link (via Global Nerdy)

Cory Doctorow

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