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"Yes, ma'am, it's very impressive, but we need to ask you a few questions." 
"We can't let these vermin infest our city. We'll have a rotten, scum-sucking cesspool." 
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...
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More talked about, I should say. At least where I live in the States, the "Leslie" term is used a lot. He is referenced far more in his death, then in his life, IMHO.
I loved almost all of his movies. He is missed, for Shirley. 
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I meet him at a couple of horse shows where his daughter was riding. He was a rather good horseman himself. A really nice man and a pleasure to talk with.
Charles Wolfe
C. Wolfe Software Engineering
modified 15-Sep-15 19:28pm.
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Leslie Nielsen movies never fail to make me laugh, RIP
--P
Always remember that you are absolutely unique. Just like everyone else.
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He's Dead and Loving It.
I see I got an upvote (thank you). I am glad someone saw knew the movie.
Mongo: Mongo only pawn... in game of life.
modified 15-Sep-15 9:38am.
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I was just looking at the post regarding comparing a program to a musical piece and it reminded me of a question a golfing acquaintance asked me on the course recently - he's my age (mid 50's) and never had anything to do with computers - ever. The nearest he's got is a mobile phone, but asked me the question 'how do you write a computer program?' - sounds simple enough, but after a minute the glazed look in his eyes and sound of the whoosh as my obviously inadequate answers to more questions passed over his head just made me laugh - try it sometime
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Ask him how and why you make a golf ball and he might get the idea that it's a about a lot of little details. 
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...
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Usually I have to dig out someone's old junk, then use some of the bad language mentioned below, question the author's mental health, throw it all away and then get to work.
The language is JavaScript. that of Mordor, which I will not utter here
This is Javascript. If you put big wheels and a racing stripe on a golf cart, it's still a f***ing golf cart.
"I don't know, extraterrestrial?"
"You mean like from space?"
"No, from Canada."
If software development were a circus, we would all be the clowns.
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I have found that most people find what we do, extremely boring. As soon as you start with the "lingo", they tune you out. The light is on, but no one is home.
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Yeah, funny monkey[^].. Sorry, what were you saying?
How do you know so much about swallows? Well, you have to know these things when you're a king, you know.
modified 31-Aug-21 21:01pm.
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More than the "lingo," it's the stepwise thinking through and abstraction of a problem that makes their eyes glaze over. Why, "that's just not fun" sayeth the liberal arts and business majors.
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"Bit by bit".
Bastard Programmer from Hell 
If you can't read my code, try converting it here[^]
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I explain it as "a repetitive process of continually breaking down a problem into simpler problems, until they are so simple a computer can understand them."
Then I add an analogy like cleaning a garage. I create piles for different types of "stuff". Sometimes I have a place for items in the pile, other times I need to split a pile up into two smaller piles to be able to decide where things should go.
Finally, my program won't work unless I find the right place for everything. There's very little room for a junk drawer in a computer program.
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I alway remember the first task I was ever given while working for some civil servant programmers while stationed at the British Army Headquarters in Germany.
In 30, 1 line sentences no more or less. Tell me how to boil an egg.
I always use that to show to how methodical and logical you have to be, to write computer programs to non technical people
Every day, thousands of innocent plants are killed by vegetarians.
Help end the violence EAT BACON
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If its an officer course then you only need 1.
Sergeant, get me a soft boiled egg.
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Pretty standard across the industry....
1) Allocate time for writing the spec, writing unit tests from the spec, writing code such that unit tests pass, functional testing, then release
2) Write the code
3) Write the units tests
4) Write the spec
5) Release
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In group introductions, the most common question is 'what do you do?'. Where some occupations garner adulation and spark a myriad of questions, 'software development' ranks right up there with 'accountant' in interest to the general public...which is fine as I'd rather not even try to explain what I do. My wife just tell people that 'he works with computers'.
"Go forth into the source" - Neal Morse
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my 4 your old tell's people I play computer games in bed on my phone
Every day, thousands of innocent plants are killed by vegetarians.
Help end the violence EAT BACON
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"I pull it out of my ass, what did you think?"
Software Zen: delete this;
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My answer: It is like solving algebra problems. That is literally what I do all day.
Identify X (y,z, etc) and solve for it. This way the user just types X, and the program
tells them what the answer is. If they scan a barcode, I lookup the price and display it.
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I say it is writing directions that the computer follows that includes questions the computer has to ask along the way that determine what further directions to follow. These directions can get more and more detailed, depending on what you are doing.
Think of writing directions for someone who has to get to your house that has to include alternate directions if there is road construction, and how to determine if you've gone too far, then getting down to details like how to deal with stop signs versus stop lights. This can go further down the rabbit hole by determining speed and when to start pressing on the brake.
Psychosis at 10
Film at 11
Those who do not remember the past, are doomed to repeat it.
Those who do not remember the past, cannot build upon it.
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remember giving that three minute speech on on how to make peanut butter and jelly sandwich?
and how, in order to make the three minute mark, you had to describe in excruciatingly boring detail every single tiny step in the process?
yeah, you already know how to write 80% of all computer programs.
the other 20% is designing the kitchen, or making your own jelly.
//ken aka groggyjava
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I sit down and have a conversation with the computer in which I explain what I mean, and then (when I test it) the computer tells me what it thinks I mean. Eventually, we come to some sort of understanding: how long this takes depends entirely on my mood and upon nothing else: the computer's attitude is a reflection of my state of mind.
I've noticed that younger programmers don't do this: instead, they sit around and define their goals, and create an architecture or something (often defined by an acronym such as YAGNI or REST, because apparently it's very important to follow the rules of someone who's never seen the problem you're trying to solve), and then they kind of force the computer to cooperate, viewing it almost as an enemy: the solution and the problem are constrained to fit within whatever they've decided their architecture will be (a-priori, often before even knowing what the problem is).
Strange.
You catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.
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Perform the following steps:
1. Understand what a computer can and cannot do.
2. Define the goal of the program.
3. Define the method to accomplish the goal in terms of things that a computer can do.
4. Enter the computer instructions determined in step 3.
5. Test the resulting program to see if it is working correctly.
6. If testing fails, troubleshoot and go to step 3.
7. Done.
Of course, the above list skips over a lot of detail, but the detail is neither understood nor wanted by the layman asking about how to program a computer. 
Fletcher Glenn
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This is going back 20+ years. We were writing software for a Diagnostic Imaging Center--one of those places with MRI, CAT, PET Scanners, and X-Ray machines. The business was still using IBM typewriters and hand faxing diagnostic reports to physicians. We wrote a system for them to compose diagnostic reports from templates, and automate the faxing. (C, dBase and Novell if anyone cares).
I was in there one day debugging and had both a hex dump up and some source code. One of the radiologists (MD) comes over and asks how do you know how to do that and what all that means? I promptly responded, the same way you know that gray shadow on the mammogram is a mass and not an artifact. She got the point.
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