Programmers' Day

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programmers%27_Day

by kexek • 15 years ago

417 83 15 years ago

en.wikipedia.org

kuroir• 15 years ago

Happy Programmers' Day! On this day I'll do what I love the most: code!

ramki• 15 years ago

Today is dedicated to all brave souls who dared to be a programmer...!!

iwwr• 15 years ago

Untangling code none dared untangle before.

dragonquest• 15 years ago

Not to forget, created tangled code to untangle later.

hollerith• 15 years ago

Any Russians want to tell us whether this holiday has any meaning to the ordinary Russians?

themoriarty• 15 years ago

Not much (as any other professional day - reclamation expert's day, railwayman's day, etc), but we're working on it!

xentronium• 15 years ago

> Any Russians want to tell us whether this holiday has any meaning to the ordinary Russians?

No.

[UPD]: Disambiguation: this holiday has no meaning to the ordinary Russians.

va1en0k3• 15 years ago

I don't know. Please have this Russian comic strip

http://habrastorage.org/storage1/9882fe1c/28be61de/5ec00a27/...

(Programmer is working. / Programmer is celebrating the programmers' day)

mainguy• 15 years ago

хорошо... каждый день, день программиста (I have no idea if that's right, but I was playing with google translate)

guard-of-terra• 15 years ago

Just to clarify: it's an official Programmer's Day today in Russia, but it's not a day off. There are all kinds of X's Day-s for many values of X there.

spiralganglion7• 15 years ago

I can't wait to see the Google Doodle for this.

BillSaysThis• 15 years ago

No Doodle for you, get back to your BDD lean cloud-backed, mobile first bootstrapped startup! Stop messing on HN or your accelerator/angel investors will take away your shiny new MacBook Air.

rkalla• 15 years ago

Well happy PD to everybody.

Today just happened to be an unexpectedly productive programming day... I guess I was "celebrating" without realizing it :)

alexanderb• 15 years ago

Happy PD, dear colleagues!

TeMPOraL2• 15 years ago

Comrades? ^^.

SkippyZA2• 15 years ago

Happy Programmers' Day. I mentioned it to our Directors yesterday. Hoping we get cake at least.

SkippyZA2• 15 years ago

Didn't get cake...

pestaa2• 15 years ago

Today is the day I must hunt down that irritating segfault, then!

pestaa2• 15 years ago

I should add that 10 minutes later I got rid of that specific segfault I spent nights on! Wish you all the same luck.

thebootstrapper• 15 years ago

Great day to quote from Dijkstra's good old article. At that time(1957) programming was not considered as a profession!

Extract from Humble Programmer[1]

"..in 1957, I married and Dutch marriage rites require you to state your profession and I stated that I was a programmer. But the municipal authorities of the town of Amsterdam did not accept it on the grounds that there was no such profession. And, believe it or not, but under the heading "profession" my marriage act shows the ridiculous entry "theoretical physicist"!.."

[1] http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD03xx/EWD340....

spiralganglion7• 15 years ago

What a quote! I would have opted for exterminator — a satisfactorily legitimate profession, and a nice bit of tongue-in-cheek for those who know what is really meant.

As a child, when asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, I always answered that I wanted to kill bugs. Of course, this was a bit before our meaning of "bug" became common knowledge, so it always got a good laugh. I'm thrilled to have followed my childhood dream to be a part of this wonderful industry of err exterminators. Happy PD everybody!

TeMPOraL2• 15 years ago

> As a child, when asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, I always answered that I wanted to kill bugs.

You should have joined the Mobile Infantry. They're doing their part in killing bugs.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7-PQIuWwLo

(yes, when people mention killing bugs, I do Starship Troopers jokes ;)).

hristov• 15 years ago

He probably would not have chosen that. Another piece of Dijkstra lore is that he really hated the term "bug". He said that by using this term the programmer tried to avoid his responsibility for making correct programs by suggesting that errors somehow creep into your program out of their own volition through no fault of the programmer.

Dijkstra was really hard core in terms of correctness. He insisted that each programmer had to work out a mathematical proof that his program will always provide correct output for every single possible input, and submit that proof when submitting the program. Things did not work out that way.

Derbasti• 15 years ago

OK then, let's solve that compile issue today then.

AngryParsley• 15 years ago

Degrees in computer science and computer engineering are in the top 10 for average earnings. We get to build all kinds of cool stuff used by people around the world. For many of us, programming is fun. And we get paid to do it!

Every day is programmer's day.

spiralganglion7• 15 years ago

Some interesting data I pulled together today:

Approximate revenue-per-employee. Data from Wolfram Alpha and Wikipedia.

Apple makes $2,000,000 per employee. Facebook makes $1,500,000. Google makes $1,000,000. Microsoft makes $800,000. Sony makes $500,000. Kraft makes $400,000. Walmart makes $200,000. McDonalds makes $60,000.

Now, if only there was a good source of users-per-engineer. I read that Facebook is somewhere around 1,260,000. That's just awesome.

We create so much value, and for so many people.

va1en0k3• 15 years ago

I hope you mean users-per-engineer. :-)

Oh, seems that Facebook makes 1.2 dollars per user from your numbers

yesbabyyes• 15 years ago

Instagram has 3 engineers[1], 9 million users[2]: 3 million users per engineer.

[1] (counting the co-founders as engineers) http://www.crunchbase.com/company/instagram [2] http://www.kullin.net/2011/09/instagram-now-has-9-million-us...

smiler• 15 years ago

Of course, these are interesting and great numbers, but I don't think that they are the only measure of value.

McDonalds may make 'only' $60,000 per employee, but it employs over 1.5 million people. I'm grateful that McDs are providing jobs for those who need them. They also of course offer opportunities for people to own franchises and run their 'own' businesses

sp3322• 15 years ago

Mozilla used to welcome each employee with a little knicknack and say, "This represents your million users. Try not to abuse them too much."

mendocino• 15 years ago

> Apple makes $2,000,000 per employee.

Most of their employees are not engineers, but work in retail. Which makes it a bit of an odd case among the other tech companies :)

mnemonicsloth• 15 years ago

Jerry Seinfeld:

   Don't give awards to comedians.

   Awards are for people who are looking for work,

   and we're not looking for work.

http://bit.ly/qs3AJu [video]

ltamake• 15 years ago

A lot of programmers are unsung and don't get the praise they deserve. Sure, you have famous programmers like Woz and Zuckerberg, but there are a lot of talented people out there that aren't even given praise at work.

wlievens• 15 years ago

Happy Programmer's Day guys and gals!

Tyrannosaurs3• 15 years ago

Anyone tell me what I'm meant to do on Programmers Day or why it even exists?

MarkPNeyer• 15 years ago

solve an np complete problem in your head!

Tyrannosaurs3• 15 years ago

Pah, real programmers are doing that every day.

hugh33• 15 years ago

Easy, for sufficiently small problem size!

simonsarris• 15 years ago

We can all do this!

Given { −2, −3, 4, 13, −1}, is there a non-empty subset of the numbers that sums to zero?

atomicdog2• 15 years ago

What are you supposed to do on "Martin Luther King" day?

Tyrannosaurs3• 15 years ago

I (stay in bed and) have a dream.

That's different, you're remembering a specific person and what they did. I don't need to remember programmers, I am one and I work with them every day.

It just feels to me like harking after gratitude but the reality is that there are loads of people who do useful, important jobs and who get on with it day after day with no more than the usual acknowledgement.

If you do this where do you stop? Firemen day? Doctors day? Sewage workers day?

If you're a programmer, you don't need a special day to think about programmers, if you're not a programmer, then programmers are just one of hundreds of useful trades you should be thankful for, but I see no reason why we're special.

TomVolpe• 15 years ago

Happy Programmers' Day! Keep on hacking!

brain5ide• 15 years ago

I'm ashamed. Came to work after lunch and just then got told it's today. Why didn't I read HN in the morning? Now have to figure out a way to make a hack in the office to awww everybody.

atomicdog2• 15 years ago

Can you imagine "programmer's day" being officially recognized in a western society such as the US or the UK? Over here, intellectual pursuits such as programming are effectively spat upon.

hugh33• 15 years ago

"Effectively spat upon", really?

The reason Programmer's Day will never be a thing here is that programming is a low-risk, well-paid, white-collar professional occupation like many others. Nothing special about it, and we don't have a lawyer's day or an actuary's day or a guy who designs the machine that makes tiles for bathrooms day.

brider• 15 years ago

That's not the best argument. We have System Administrator's appreciation day and Administrative Professionals day here in the USA.

jisaacstone• 15 years ago

I, for one, am all for a "guy who designs the machine that makes tiles for bathrooms" day.

No seriously, manufacturing engineers need more recognition, and don't even belong on the same list as lawyers. More children need to know that "building machines" is a viable career choice. I wish I had known . . . [/rant]

mathattack• 15 years ago

Let's just be practical and all take today off!

cgarvey• 15 years ago

"...the color white was chosen because it represents a hex number with the largest value in a 24-bit red green blue (RGB) color space: 0xFFFFFF, so programmers worldwide wear white in celebration."

Only Programmers would have a holiday in which we wear white after labor day to celebrate.

hugh33• 15 years ago

Just remember to take a spare shirt, for after you spill your breakfast burrito on the first one.

philwelch• 15 years ago

Russian Labor Day is May 1.

drcube• 15 years ago

Being the 256th day, why wouldn't they choose the color 0x000100? Green's my favorite color.

Killah9112• 15 years ago

Wishing all programmers Manÿ Happÿ Returns of the Daÿ and Maÿ each one of those Returns compile successfullÿ

ÿ : 256th ascii character (should henceforth be the Programmers' day symbol)

correction: Extended ASCII character per http://www.ascii-code.com/

ysangkok• 15 years ago

There are only 128 ASCII characters.

Killah9112• 15 years ago

You're right, I should have said Extended ASCII

unwind• 15 years ago

Nit-pick: that's not an ASCII character at all, since ASCII is a 7-bit encoding it does not contain a code point with the value 255 (or 256).

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCII and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C5%B8#Character_encodings.

burgerbrain• 15 years ago

How about: λ

phatbyte2• 15 years ago

Happy Programmer's Day. Wish you a full day of coding with no bugs :P

MattGrommes• 15 years ago

If you don't have any bugs, how do you know your code is working correctly? I personally never trust code that works on the first try. :)

phatbyte2• 15 years ago

You should try writing some unit tests then :P

adambyrtek• 15 years ago

Looks like my birthday is on Programmers' Day, nice.

forther2• 15 years ago

256 can NOT be represented with 8 bits

spiralganglion7• 15 years ago

That's the number of distinct values you get with 8 bits. Since there is no "zeroth" day of the year, it makes sense to have it on the 256th day instead of the 255th.

forther2• 15 years ago

yep. I just commented on exact wiki words.

ycatvfan• 15 years ago

I did not know this, otherwise I could have taken the day off.

Programmers' Day

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