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Comment by juliangamble | Hacker News Reader

“Magic numbers.” You are, after all, a witch. “Every class begins with a babe, in a cafe.”

Including a reference to the first 8 hex characters of every Java class. Such detail and prose!

Huh, TIL, thanks! https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2808646/why-are-the-firs...

I'm guessing that's the St. Michael's Alley in Palo Alto? It's still there if that's the one - pretty nice Italian restaurant. I think the Java building was originally 156 University Ave so it would have been down the street.

That Java "cafe babe" magic number seemed unfortunate, in hindsight, because of what was going on in industry when Java launched.

Besides programming suddenly becoming more of a "bro" thing than before, due to the dotcom gold rush, there was sexism that hit close to Java.

Kim Polese was business leadership for Java, but there were sexist slights in the field, like, IIRC, an article in the business press suggesting that she was able to get lunch with anyone because (the article said) she was an attractive woman. Nevermind that Java obviously had monumental promise at the time, both for software development in general, and for the future of the skyrocketing Web, and Polese was arguably the person to network with, if you could.

Here's one quick, incomplete introduction to the environment at the time: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/people-in-technology/...

When that started happening, 0xCAFEBABE felt like something one might've chosen to do differently, had one known all the overt sexism that would be going on, including targeted at one's colleague.

> Besides programming suddenly becoming more of a "bro" thing than before, due to the dotcom gold rush, there was sexism that hit close to Java.

The article references that, implicitly, by making the aforementioned babe male in this story.

Originally, there was also going to be 0xCAFED00D - BABE was for the class file, and D00D was for serialized object files, and the two together would give you the ability to move programs over the network, mobile agents and "the network is the computer" being the vision at the time.

However, that vision did not come to pass, so there was no mobile object format. 0xCAFED00D eventually got used in the Pack200 format, which has now also fallen by the wayside.

I think if you were cool in the '90s, "babe" and "dude" seemed like perfectly natural, even rad, ways to refer to people. Particularly if you only had access to hexadecimal digits.

You probably wouldn't pick those terms today, sure.

I can't speak for the context in which the magic number was chosen, but in this context, the creation of classes, the usage of "babe" seems to more closely refer the definition wherein it refers to a "a baby infant". In fact, I initially didn't realise where the claim of sexism came from until I read the phrase a second time and remembered that there was also another definition of that word.

I assure you, the intent was not to refer to a baby.

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