• Cris_Citrus@piefed.zip
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    22 days ago

    This is so much better not being a programmer, and having no context. I just get to watch this get posted and people are enjoying whatever the fuck this is, and that makes me happy

    • pedz@lemmy.ca
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      22 days ago

      TBF this is not really about programming. You have to be knowledgeable about how computers work and their history for this one.

      • Mountainaire@lemmy.world
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        22 days ago

        Okay, so go on… I, too, am hardly a programmer yet hangs out here anyway and have no idea of what this is all about, haha.

        • DaleGribble88@programming.dev
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          22 days ago

          The weird text the main bird is rattling off it something called “Assembly”. Many programming languages don’t really tell the computer what to do, they more or less outline the behavior they want, and then another program called a compiler turns that into 1s and 0s that a computer can actually understand. If you’ve ever heard of binary, that’s what these 1s and 0s are. Assembly is one level of abstraction* above the 1s and 0s. It is a good way for humans to understand what a computer is actually doing without having to look at the original programming code, and without 1s and 0s. So the main bird represents a computer doing it’s thing, running some program.

          Then comes the crow with a “Hello It’s me. The Keyboard! Someone pressed the letter e.” The crow represents something called an interrupt, which is exactly what it sounds like. It interrupts the normal flow of a program to signal to a computer “Hey, you need to deal with this. Like, now.”

          The reason why he is a keyboard is because that is how old keyboards used to work. Before USB ruled the world, mice and keyboards used something called a PS2 port. If you ever saw an old mouse or keyboard with a green or purple plug on one end instead of a USB, then that’s the old style we are talking about.

          Modern USB keyboards are a little more polite and will wait in a line until the computer is ready to deal with whatever the human just typed, but old PS2 keyboards used interrupts to demand attention. This was really important for old slow computers that needed to respond to user input ASAP. Modern computers can handle that sort of thing a little bit better.

          I think that is enough context to understand the meme.

          *Not really: see ISA layer and micro-ops for more information

    • fulg@lemmy.world
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      22 days ago

      The thing that bothers me the most here is that the meme is using 64bit assembly instructions, which did not exist at the time keyboards were using IRQs to communicate. 🤣