Jane Bailey

Jane Bailey is a self-published author of urban fantasy novels as well as a part-time blogger; in their day job, they're a renaissance person, dabbling in all sorts of fields in search of interesting puzzles and finding mostly WTFs.

Mar 2020

Wrecking the Curve

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FORTRAN punch card (public domain)

Most of our WTFs are produced on modern hardware, but today we're taking you back to the dawn of computing, back to the 1960s, when our submitter, Robert, was in college. Rob was taking a class in Numerical Analysis, which allowed people to submit their programs to the university computer (singular, as this was before computers were cheap enough to have a whole lab of 30+ of them just lying around for students). This involved using a keypunch machine to punch cards to run a FORTRAN program that might give you the answers to your homework. It was marginally faster than using a slide rule, until you factored in that students had low priority on the queue to submit their programs to be run, so they'd have to wait hours, if not days, to get access. Most students didn't even bother with the expensive machine, simply doing their maths the old-fashioned way and leaving it at that.


Simple Class

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JSON vector logo

Sometimes, you just know one of your coworkers isn't pulling his or her weight on the team. Sometimes it's the slacker co-worker, the one you always see browsing Facebook or getting coffee and never on pull requests or in architecture meetings. Sometimes it's the absent one, the one always seeming to be on sick leave or "working from home." And sometimes it's the guy who you wish would slack off just so you could stop reviewing his inane, poorly-executed code.