The Princess Programmer [satire]
The Text
Once upon a time, in a distant kingdom, lived a beautiful princess. She had beautiful hair. In fact, its colour was your favourite hair colour. She also had beautiful eyes. Their colour was your favourite eyes’ colour, even if it is incompatible with your favourite hair colour. She was kind, noble, passionate, and was loved by her parents, her family, her friends, and her citizens.
As princesses go, she was also an alicorn. (All princesses in Equestria are alicorns, and all alicorns are princesses. Sometimes, it is nice to have more than one word to call members of a certain set.)
But even beautiful and loved princesses sometimes get bored, or at least tired of thinking they are so fortunate to be loved and considered beautiful by many people (who in Equestria are generally animated ponies and other animals and mythical creatures) and so did the subject of this tale. So she found a job working as a programmer.
She read and wrote source codes in many programming languages, for many platforms and architectures, and for many employers / clients / commissioners. But then she ran into a problem. You see: she had to hack on both Perl (5) codes and Perl 6 (which would later be renamed to ”Raku”) codes, and found that the DuckDuckGo web-search engine had a bias towards yielding Perl 5 results.
As a result, the beautiful princess, volunteered to try to help improve DuckDuckGo. One potential improvement path she and her co-workers pursued was to translate its code from Perl 5 to Perl 6. The search-engine with the translated code in general functioned fairly well, but unfortunately exhibited a web-searches' bias towards yielding Perl 6 results.
Our Princess Programmer, and many of her fellow Perl 5 / Perl 6 programmers felt like they were damned either way ( Reference 1 ; Reference 2 ). But there was a happy ending. First of all, our protagonist and her software developer friends, discovered and often contributed to more Internet services: IRC (freenode/etc.), Stack Exchange, Reddit (and good old Usenet and mailing lists), GitHub, etc. Moreover, sometimes Google's Filter bubble was advantageous, and it can be accessed using the "!g" bangsearch of DuckDuckGo. Equesterian ponies do not care too much about Internet services fingerprinting them because they only have one finger on every hoof, and it has no fingerprint. They can still use the touch screens of their iPhone-like smartphones though.
Moreover, as they became more experienced, they became less dependent on looking-up stuff online or asking for help for them on Internet forums for help. They still have known better than to rest on their laurels and consider themselves know-it-all masters of their crafts and skills (or at least the ones they cared about).
As a result, the Princess and her colleagues (and friends) had more time for recreational pastimes, including playing a role-playing game based on her favourite fictional universe franchise, "Advanced Milky Way Earth's Geeks", where she often played humans (and other sentient characters) playing Equestrians, including herself.
And they all lived happily (but not uneventfully) ever after.
See Also
TODO: add more
Copyright and Licence
This document is Copyright by Shlomi Fish, 2024, and is available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike License 4.0 Unported (or at your option any later version).
For securing additional rights, please contact Shlomi Fish, and see the explicit requirements that are being spelt from abiding by that licence.