What code DOESN’T do in real life (that it does in the movies)

Hilarious list by Matt Inman over at Drivl.com

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).

2. Code is not green text on a black background
Sure, code can be green text on a black background if you want it to, but most programmers use syntax highlighting and sysadmins configure their shell to use ANSI color.

3. Code has structure
According to the movies all programmers abhor the space bar and enter key. In the real world code has structure - it’s got line breaks, spacing, and indentation. Granted, we’ve all written our share of unreadable hacks: I used to write a lot of perl and I had a knack for writing nasty regular expressions that moved many of my successors to committing seppuku, but those days are over. It’s all about clarity now.

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