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Comment by sam0x17 | Hacker News Reader

Is leaving a piece of metal out in the rain coding? Is having coffee coding? Are snakes coding? Is a bad grade on a test coding? Is a musical note coding? Is a red gemstone coding? Is an even worse grade on a test coding? Is something found in an oyster shell coding?

Any other fun ones I missed?

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> Is leaving a piece of metal out in the rain coding? Is having coffee coding? Are snakes coding? Is a bad grade on a test coding? Is a musical note coding? Is a red gemstone coding? Is an even worse grade on a test coding? Is something found in an oyster shell coding?

Rust, Java, Python, C++, C#, Ruby, C, Perl. God you guys totally missed it.

dang: now who had the shallow dismissal

What you did there, they didn't see it.

If this was reddit and not HN, they would.

Can you guys be a little more serious. Some of us have to pretend we're working when we read this at work.

Look, good jokes don't need to be explained but more importantly it's "Perl" and it has something to do with onions and camels.

There's also the connection between knitting and perling...

Pretty sure it's purling.

That's a riddle disguised as a joke

I thought people would get to the ruby part and immediately get it xD

Another musical note (F#), a really bad grade on a test (D), a lady (Ada), more coffee (CoffeeScript), a follow on movie (SQL), a speech characteristic (Lisp), a branding image (Logo), A factory worker (Assembler), A Canal, Panama.

"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

You totally missed the joke.

That's always possible.

My wife knits. Yes, it’s like coding: it has a language, there are algorithms, instruction-sets and tools. And sometimes bugs you have to back-step to correct.

Read the comment carefully before having a knee-jerk reaction next time. So sick of people on here assuming something is a negative comment.

So, if the comment isn't negative, then what is its content? Your explication https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19950959 points out the puns/jokes/over-literal descriptions (which, indeed, I missed on first read), but I still don't understand what the point of the comment was—the descriptions don't help me understand anything about the idea of knitting as coding.

It's a comment. It's meant to be fun -- the title got to have fun and play around with words, why can't we?

How I thought this would go: 30 upvotes and tons of people replying with more clever/forced programming languages fitting in that format.

How this went: no one gets it because everyone here is so ready for a fight that they don't even try to understand what people are saying, and the downvotes pile up. Deng swoops in and posts his generic "dont dismiss people's comments" message, which is hilarious because that's exactly what he did and it's exactly what you did.

There's two aspects to a joke that are equally important: one is being clever, the other is reading the room. A witty remark delivered in a snide tone followed up with a hot punchline is good for some lulz, but it's kinda like making a joke at the expense of the bartender who works at the comedy club every night.

Is piling parentheses coding? Is teasing with a feather coding? Is having a violent reaction coding?

Perl is coding, knitting has two standard commands: a knit, and a purl. It's a pun.

In your defense, I didn't get it until I read some of the other comments.

>Read the comment carefully before having a knee-jerk reaction next time. So sick of people on here assuming something is a negative comment.

If many, many people are misunderstanding your comment's sentiment, the problem is with the writer, not the parsers.

Better luck next time.

In fact some of the earliest programmable machines were weaving looms, automatically generating complex patterns. And, of course, this spurred the earliest protests against job losses to automation, with the Luddite movement.

My girlfriend knits too, and I think it's a toss up on which one of us curses more. Me when I realize the stupid thing I did which had been eluding me for the past hour, or her when she realizes how many rows she has to undo to get back to the point the incorrect stitch was made. At least I can just highlight, delete or just hit cmd-z. It can take her quite a bit more time to undo.

I hope she is aware of other ways of fixing knitting mistakes given here https://knitom.com/fix-knitting-mistakes-stress-free/ (or google for 'knit ladder down').

Without knowing what is being knitted, you may not be able to perform those techniques easily. Try that for a lace pattern with a finer yarn. Even frogging can be difficult.

>My wife knits.

I think we found the reason some folks are adamant it isn't coding.

Reminds me of this tweet: https://twitter.com/1opter/status/810258612316729344

Knitting is Turing complete, and the punch card/jacquard loom analogies practically write themselves

reminds me of that software development conference where a developer could receive a tattoo with a favorite language icon from an O'Reilly book cover - thus becoming a better programmer, no doubt!

musical notes are...

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