Did You Know Today Is 'The Day of the Programmer'? (wikipedia.org) 62
Long-time Slashdot reader destinyland shares Wikipedia's entry reminding us that this year's "Day of the Programmer" falls on September 13:
The Day of the Programmer is an international professional day that is celebrated on the 256th (hexadecimal 100th, or the 2**8th) day of each year (September 13 during common years and on September 12 in leap years). It is officially recognized in Russia.
The number 256 (2**8) was chosen because it is the number of distinct values that can be represented with a byte, a value well known to programmers...
In China, the programmer's day is October 24, which has been established for many years. The date was chosen because it can also be written as 1024, which is equal to 210. It is also consistent regardless of leap years.
The original submission suggests we celebrate with "this delightful acoustic version of Code Monkey, which songwriter Jonathan Coulton describes as "how it feels to write software for a living."
But did any Slashdot readers even know today was The Day of the Programmer?
The number 256 (2**8) was chosen because it is the number of distinct values that can be represented with a byte, a value well known to programmers...
In China, the programmer's day is October 24, which has been established for many years. The date was chosen because it can also be written as 1024, which is equal to 210. It is also consistent regardless of leap years.
The original submission suggests we celebrate with "this delightful acoustic version of Code Monkey, which songwriter Jonathan Coulton describes as "how it feels to write software for a living."
But did any Slashdot readers even know today was The Day of the Programmer?
Sounds a bit sinister (Score:3)
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Well, 2020 is a leap year, so by the "rule" for programmers' day (first I'm hearing of it) was yesterday.
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i remember when india rented programmers at 10 cents on the dollar.
today i use gpt-3 which is open source and free.
and i am certain there is somebody somewhere that can make a buggy wip
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Like The Day of the Triffids or Night of the Living Dead.
I was thinking more of Night of the Comet [imdb.com] .
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Day of the Jackel? Day of the Dolphin?
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Seems like it should be
All Programmers Eve
or
Noche de los Programadores
Every day is "something" day (Score:5, Insightful)
There are days for every trivial thing. So I only keep track of the ones which will get me in trouble if I forget, like our wedding anniversary or mothers day...
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July 31st is SysAdmin day. Never announce it unless you want a pictures of a voodoo doll that looks just like you.
People hate the IT department. There's no love for a cost center.
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Quoting Drucker, who coined the term 'profit center', only to repudiate it later in life:
http://gregoryhwatson.eu/image... [gregoryhwatson.eu]
"Perhaps one of the most provocative quality related comments Drucker makes is when he defines the meaning of a profit center within an organization: “Inside an organization there are only cost centers. The only profit center is the customer whose check has not bounced.”
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Yeah, who has time to remember every Russian holiday?
... holiday remembers YOU!
Re: Every day is "something" day (Score:2)
Every day (Score:5, Interesting)
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Friend: hey it's the week-end, are you doing something special?
Programmer: what the fuck is a "week-end"?
OK World Programmer Day (Score:3)
Leap year (Score:4, Informative)
No. Nobody else knows either. (Score:2)
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12 or 13? (Score:2)
That's just a one off error (Score:4, Funny)
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The irony is strong at least. Typical of dealing with dates, exceptions to the rule. Its always X, except for when its Y.
Every day is something (Score:5, Informative)
According to nationaldaycalendar.com, which I consider to be a foremost authority, today is also:
Does any of that matter? Is any of it meaningful? Does anyone give a shit about any of it?
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In the big picture if a special day makes someone else's day better I am all for it. Could there be negative or unforeseen consequences maybe. Bit I do not see any atm.
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While I guess it makes sense that
National Hug Your Hound Day is the same day as National Pet Memorial Day, and
National Grandparents Day is the same day as National Bald Is Beautiful Day, but
it is a little odd that National Kids Take Over The Kitchen Day and National Peanut Day also fall on National Celiac Disease Awareness Day.
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it is a little odd that National Kids Take Over The Kitchen Day and National Peanut Day also fall on National Celiac Disease Awareness Day.
Tomorrow is kids get anaphylaxis day and kids take over the ER day
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I always thought the 15th should have been the Ides of April because taxes, but noooo, M&M and OJ!
(For those not exposed to that mnemonic: the Ides is the 13th of most months, but it is the 15th of March, May, October and July. M&Ms and OJ would make a terrible combination.)
Re: Every day is something (Score:2)
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Kind of like investing in startups. Throw a bunch of things out there and see what sticks, then milk it. Most of our holidays are about Marketing and nothing more.
Dia de los Programadores sounds fun but is in fact boring and no one cares. I don't need a parade, just get out of the way and let me do my work.
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The Architect does not share his day. Now stop asking questions otherwise he'll disconnect you!
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Very Jurassic Park response, not so much a Matrix response.
I don't have a Day of the Programmer (Score:2)
The clock I wrote crashes after the 255th day of each year.
It was yesterday (Score:1)
2020 is (among other more horrid things) a leap year, so the 256th day was yesterday 12.
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I was going to reply with an off-by-one joke of some form but your reality update is better than any joke I would have made.
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Maybe it's designed this way for a reason? Maybe the design spec states:
"Every four years, the day of the programmer must suffer an 'off-by-one' error to symbolize the relationship of the programmer to his craft. "
i.e. A feature, not a bug. :-P
256 cannot be represented by a byte (Score:2)
Unsigned byte value range is 0-255. Perhaps whoever chose 256 as "a value which can be represented by a byte" was not a programmer, at least not one who undersatands what a byte is (programming using many levels of abstractions maybe?)
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Touche! Forgot that Jan 1st is the zeroth day of the year.
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Maybe the original text/idea was that 256 is "the number of possible values that can be represented by a byte" (0~255) and not "a value which can be represented by a byte". A non-programmer may have "simplified" the description and messed it up in the process.
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Calendars don't use a day zero, so 255 represents 256.
210? You meant 2**10 perhaps? (Score:2)
19 comments in, and nobody pointed out "1024, which is equal to 210" is wrong? It must be Sunday.
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As usual, Slashdot probably ate a non-ASCII character.
And before anyone says "1024" is not October 24th, remember that in ISO 8601 dates are written YYYY-MM-DD, so it really is 1024. Fuck the english AND the french way of writing dates.
Re: 210? You meant 2**10 perhaps? (Score:3)
But ISO is a European based organisation, historically USA wasn't involved.
It's only the Americans who thought it would be a good idea to not put the parts of a date in any kind of order based on their magnitude.
You have to admit both dd/mm/yyyy and yyyy-mm-dd are both better than mm/dd/yyyy
Re: 210? You meant 2**10 perhaps? (Score:4, Informative)
The problem with dd/mm/yyyy vs mm/dd/yyyy is that you never know which format you're looking at. It's a huge problem in Canada because so many products come from the USA. The worst part is, people still haven't learned anything from Y2K and a lot of dates are still being written as dd/mm/yy, mm/dd/yy or even yy/mm/dd (yes I've seen plenty of ISO 8601 dates using slashes instead of dashes) so it's even worst than you think.
If you see food with a best before date of 10/12/20, is it "10 décembre 2020", "December 20th 2010", "October 12 2020"? And I won't even talk about companies who put a stupid internal-use-only code on their food instead of a best before date, AFAIK that's been illegal in Canada for at least a decade or two.
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Seems unlikely that Slashdot ate a non-ASCII character. Both ^ and * are ASCII characters and ** was used just fine in the sentence before it.
As usual, Slashdot probably doesn't check stories.
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https://www.fileformat.info/in... [fileformat.info]
Maybe it disappeared when previewing and the poster "fixed it" by typing "10" manually without knowing the mistake he/she just made.
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Yes, that's what I said. Unless you're talking about the choice of power symbol, which is ** in a lot of programming language and which is what was used in the first sentence quoted, which is why I reused it, because consistency makes sense in this case.
there are only 10 types of people... (Score:2)
To celebrate the Day of the Programmer... (Score:2)
This year is extra special... (Score:1)
...because on this year's Programmer's Day, unixtime passed 16x10^8.
1600000000 = 2020-09-13 12:26:40 UTC
Clueless! (Score:2)