Lambda the Ultimate

"In stitches" is one of several great Englishisms that's made it across the pond—I believe post-WWII, when a great deal of cultural cross-pollination occurred, e.g. stop signs in America are red hexagons, just as they are in Germany.

Speaking of Germany, when I was in MacDTS at Apple, we occasionally had to field developer questions from overseas. We received an e-mail from a German developer that included a source-code snippet. Of course the code was relatively English-like, but the comments were in German. One of the comments was "Hier ist das Kode kaput." Most of my colleagues fell all over themselves laughing at the German developer using this vaguely archaic American American expression that they probably remembered from Warner Brothers cartoons of their childhood. Another German-speaking colleague and I explained that "kaput" is simply German for "broken," and came to America, again, post-WWII. Warner Brothers made a tremendous number of films and cartoons during the war; their extensive contact with the servicepeople of the day caused them to pick up a lot of the lingo. "Kaput" sounded just as funny to those WWII servicepeople as it did to my 1990's colleagues, and so it came home with them, thence to Warner Brothers, thence to us non-military types.

Typo? Octagons, actually.

Braino, not typo. Right you are. :-)

<blasphemy>

Doubtless God *wanted* to choose Lisp.

But He was likely overruled by management, who wanted the project done in seven days, and weren't about to permit deployment of technology they've never heard of. :)

Besides. The Universe was coded in some combination of PHP, SQL with obnoxious vendor extensions, with a few bits of legacy Cobol here and there--PL/I as well. Oh, and a proprietary configuration language written by a long-departed consultant, which nobody in Heaven understands, and thus the entire staff is forbidden to touch.

And all code is developed and tested on the production server; there's no room in the budget for the programmers to have their own sandbox.

So there. :)

</blasphemy>

“Oh, and a proprietary configuration language written by a long-departed consultant…”

Lucifer?

NT