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I love Hot Takes(TM) like this which purport to imply that the majority of profitable programming isn't Real(TM), and only those applications that are governmen

I love Hot Takes(TM) like this which purport to imply that the majority of profitable programming isn't Real(TM), and only those applications that are government, military or academic are somehow Real(TM). The irony is of course that the software and hardware in use is only as powerful and useful as it is because a billion people wanted processors to take, share and look at cat pictures... (That, and programmers with "real jobs" [see what I did there] happen to think the opposite, that cashing your government grant isn't a real job!)

nickpsecurity 9y ago
It was probably a reference to this old piece of satire: http://web.mit.edu/humor/Computers/real.programmers http://web.mit.edu/humor/Computers/real.programmers In this case, there would be lots of programmers in HPC field alone who want the micro and macro benchmarks to be good since they're squeezing every bit of number crunching they can out piles of machines they spent a fortune on. When I studied supercomputing, they were timing everything from latency of memory operations (esp NUMA) to context switches on CPU's to raw MIPS. The suppliers were competing on that stuff, too.
- semi-extrinsic 9y ago
  Yes, I was not entirely serious. The word I was looking for was "flippant", but I couldn't conjure it up when writing so I wrote "blunt".