© Arun Thomas / Image: The New Stack
/* *You are not expected *to understand this. */
Glenn laughed out loud in spite of the enormity of the problem facing him.
“You are not expected to understand this.” It was probably the single most famous code comment in the history of UNIX and maybe the history of all Operating System programming. It first appeared in the Sixth Edition of the UNIX OS in 1975 and preceded the explanation of how context switching was performed.
The phrase has become so popular that it has appeared on everything from adult sized t-shirts to baby onesies.
The code comment disappeared in 1979 when context switching was rewritten for UNIX v7, but it lives on in the collective consciousness of nerdness.
The comment would have been a lot more funny if he understood the code that had been constantly streaming through his console for the past month. It reminded him of the scene in the movie “The Matrix” when Cypher was looking at the Matrix in code.
The code for the Matrix was too complex to be processed through an interpreter so you had to monitor it raw.
Too complex.
poweredbyrobots.com 