H ave you ever wondered what a bus full of programmers would sing while en-route to a programming competition? Actually, they probably wouldnit sing since they would all be concentrating on their PowerBook screens; and what would they be concentrating on? Writing code that would produce the same results as singing the away-trip standard 99 Bottles Of Beer On The Wall, of course!
Of course, they wouldnit just write the famous count-down logic in one language, no! Our bus-o-geeks would unite in programming glee and produce code that would take one down and pass it around in every programming and scripting language from Assembler to Z Shell. By contrast, a bus full of jocks would barely manage to sing it in one language and only if someone read them the lyrics.
Now, what would all of that code look like? Wonder no more. Thereis a site that has a growing list of programming solutions, each able to decrement bottles of beer efficiently and without error. 99 Bottles of Beer has no less than 515 versions of the logic of the same name. Marvel at how complicated the simple logic is to perform in C#, gasp at the simplicity of Turbo Pascal, snicker at the completeness of the Algol 80 entry. There are programming languages from the popular to the obscure.
Very geeky. Very entertaining.
We bet you are wondering where we found this. The 99 Bottles of Beer site was mentioned on another equally eccentric site, BoingBoing. What is Boing-Boing? Youill just have to go there and see for yourself.
Do you have a Cool Waste of Time you found on the Internet? Tell Vern Seward all about it, and heis pass it around...