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Comment by alxbrun | Hacker News Reader

I was having a beer in this small Brazilian town, mid-afternoon. Two girls come to my table. We try to chat ; they can't speak any foreign language and my Portuguese is awful.

- Me: What is your job ?

- The girls: Programma

- Me (for the next 30 minutes): Oh great, me too ! Which languages ? <here comes the enumeration of the 100 programming languages I know, each one pronounced in 10 different ways, Brazilian accent, etc.>

Even "Java" didn't seem to mean anything to them. Strange. I assumed they had special programming languages in Brazil.

10 years later, in Palo Alto. I read some article about Brazil society. One word catches my attention.

Programma = Prostitute. Oh.

So yes, don't call yourself a programmer. Especially in Brazil when you don't know the language.

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Not that this has anything to do with your story, but Lua was originally written in Brazil because of governmental restrictions on imported software which precluded the use of more mainstream languages. They did, in fact, have special programming languages in Brazil.

That's pretty funny. In case anyone's wondering, the full term is "garota de programa", literally "girl of program" or "program girl". Obviously, the English is "call girl".

Normally, "programa" just means events, like "what's the program for the evening?". Here, of course, you can figure it out yourself.

Now I'm wondering if there is a difference between call-by-value girls and call-by-reference girls.

I'm going to regret this joke, but: I posit the difference lies in how much cache you need.

well done.

If only my wife's body was immutable.

I'd love to continue this but I have garbage collection to attend to.

And they say nobody around here has a sense of humor! Happy to see it was just a matter of injecting the proper dependencies!

Whoops, came to reddit by accident.

I think you want a mutable wife. Otherwise you'll eventually have to throw her out and get a new one.

The compiler will optimize that.

Guys, please keep this stuff on /r/programming. The signal to noise ratio on HN is already bad enough.

>Normally, "programa" just means events, like "what's the program for the evening?".

This also sounds like "escort" in english. it seems to be implied that an escort would escort you somewhere. But not necessarily.

> Obviously, the English is "call girl".

So, this conversation could have happened in America, with the title switched to "call-center associate"?

I don't know if I'm laughing more at the confusion on your part, or the likely confusion on their part after you told them you were a programma too. Hilarious.

Up to this day I'm still wondering if the girls thought that "Java" was a very special service I was requesting.

Oh man, that's very funny.

10 years later, those two programmas in that Brazilian small town would still be recounting to their fellow programmas and friends that:

- There are male programmas in America (in fact, the rumor says that most of the programmas are male) and,

- The strange ritual of male programmas from America is that they start to recite these about 100 strange sounding words, and ask you if you know any of them.

Haha I laughed to this. Specially because I'm brazilian.

And yes, it is the same word, 'program' is a slang for prostitute work. We programmers here joke a lot about this :)

It goes both ways. In the US many "consultants" / "independent consultants" refer to themselves as "whores" especially when applying their talents (for money of course) to companies or projects they disrespect.

And a lot of contractors in the UK refer to agents as "pimps"

Well, they are relationship hackers.

You should have told them that you specialize in back-end servers.

Curious about which city you're talking about... :)

In the end, we're all whores.

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