The other day I was coding. I wasn’t sure if it was afternoon or maybe evening… A single ray of red sunglight (dusk? dawn?) somehow found its way to a patch above my ergonomic chair. And my computer was strange. I had to put scrabble letters and plastic fish onto the screen just right, but they kept falling down. Also, my desk was sloped so the keyboard and mouse kept falling heavily into my lap, if I wasn’t careful to keep holding them up.
I looked around the office, and all my coworkers were happily, frantically typing away. And also, putting scrabble letters onto their screens, and sometimes reaching into the screen to squishily adjust something or other. Far away someone shouted, “101100101!” and was rewarded with scattered polite chuckles.
They were all very old.
I asked, “Should you still be here?”
“Oh yes! We have much work to do! We’re the only ones who understand the Olden Code!” He certainly seemed enthusiastic. “You know, job security, ha ha! In fact, this year I think we’ll be able to add a feature!”
“Yes, yes, a feature!” offered another in a nearby cube.
“But… should you still be here?”
A voice from a yet different cube answered, though he too didn’t turn to look. “Of course! We can’t leave. No no! We owe the Company. But that’s ok! It’s warm here.”
“And we have frozen burritos!” a fourth added.
“I was almost paid off,” another voice contributed, from a row or two over, “but then we got more users, so I had to stay on. Successful product, say what!”
More conversation ensued in this odd fashion, voices chirping from nearby cubes. But I didn’t understand. I wandered the aisles. One cube was decorated with a collection of old action figures, another with tiny bicycles, another with foam palm trees. And then I saw, posted in the break room, The Menu.
Fixed-Priced Items
(These are billed to you just once, regardless of software deployment volume)
- Using goto: $0.01 per use
- Using continue: $0.02 per use
- Extending a class: $1.00
- Extending an interface: $2.00
- Extending Vector: $50.00
- Public static variable: $100 each
- Reading environment variable: $100 each
- Duplicated source code file: $1000
Variable-Priced Items
(These items are billed per event on your user’s computer.)
- Writing a file from the File menu: Free
- Writing a text file: $0.50
- Writing a binary file: $5.00
- Writing a “dot” file: $15.00
- Writing any file in $HOME: $20.00
- Cost for file size during installation: $0.0001 per gigabyte
- Modal dialog with two choices: $0.50
- Modal dialog with one choice: $1.00
- User enters illegal value: $10.00
- Spawning a thread (application): $0.01
- Spawning a thread (library): $0.99
- Launching a subprocess: $1.00
- Launching a Perl subprocess: $10.00
- Launching a Cygwin subprocess: Two Months’ Salary
Happy Coding! :-) :-) :-)
The Company Needs You!
I was terrified. I would be discovered, and I’d be billed. I knew I’d done all these things. And then I thought, well, it is warm in here… it’s better than being outside, in the rain, without a burrito.