Welcome to the fiftieth (what? Already?) issue of De Programmatica Ipsum, dedicated to Humor. In this edition, we review the greatest classics of humor in computing, software, and geekdom; we re-read and re-laugh about "The Tao of Programming" by Geoffrey James in the Library section; and in the third entry of the Vidéothèque section, we wipe tears of laughter watching "Wat" by Gary Bernhardt.
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A Eulogy For Schadenfreude
The quality and quantity of humor in society are inversely proportional to its well-being. Case in point: can you name a famous humorist from Switzerland? Well, with the exception of Patrick Chappatte, who arguably made a bigger splash on the pages of The New York Times than on those of Le Temps or the Neue Zürcher Zeitung. On the other hand, Argentina is known (if not worldwide, at least in Latin America) as a fertile ground for cartoonists, comedians, and authors of satire. After all, what is a humorist to do in a happy world? Not much.
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Gary Bernhardt
One of the most visible side-effects of specialization is that we miss on interesting things existing in other technical galaxies. This is one of the main goals of this magazine; to point to stars in other locations of the sky and let people discover amazing new people. If you are not in the web, JavaScript, or Ruby galaxies, you might have missed on Gary Bernhardt, and that would be too bad.
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Geoffrey James
Western culture has long been fascinated with what the French call "Extrême-Orient"; since the times of Marco Polo, most probably since biblical times. We (the editors of a magazine that is, after all, a pure product of Western civilization) assign certain qualities to the thinking patterns of those regions: wisdom, calmness, thoughtfulness, and reflection. Eastern philosophy is often analyzed in counterpoint, in a tangential or even orthogonal fashion from its western counterpart: Confucius versus Aristotle; reason versus faith; extrovert versus introvert; yin versus yang; pandas versus grizzlies; Bruce Lee versus Chuck Norris.
