I can’t say that it made me a better programmer, but this mashup of Brian W Kernighan & Dennis M Ritchie’s classic “The C Programming Language” with the elder horrors of HP Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos has alerted me to the urgent problem of inadvertent dimensional rifts that may be opened through poor programming practice:
And yet I saw them in a limitless stream- flopping, hopping, croaking, bleating- sorting themselves inhumanly through the spectral moonlight in a grotesque, malignant saraband of fantastic nightmare. Their croaking, baying voices called out in the hideous language of the Old Ones:
void Rlyeh
(int mene[], int wgah, int nagl) {
int Ia, fhtagn;
if (wgah>=nagl) return;
swap (mene,wgah,(wgah+nagl)/2);
fhtagn = wgah;
for (Ia=wgah+1; Ia if (mene[Ia] swap (mene,++fhtagn,Ia);
swap (mene,wgah,fhtagn);
Rlyeh (mene,wgah,fhtagn-1);
Rlyeh (mene,fhtagn+1,nagl);} // PH'NGLUI MGLW'NAFH CTHULHU!
(via JWZ)