Apropos of Nothing, as Cheryl Crow once put it, here’s something you don’t see very often: compiler humor. From another era when engineers were still allowed to inject whimsy into software, Tony Cunningham offers us a selection of error messages from Apple’s MPW C compiler. Take a look. Some of them are hilarious; they’re all amusing.
You don’t see this anymore, of course. The suits came along and insisted that such things weren’t “professional” and trivialized the very important products that they were trying to sell to other humorless drones.
There’s a long tradition of this sort humor, especially in the Unix world. There’s the famous “bug” listed at the end of the tunefs man page: You can tune a file system, but you can’t tunafish. That joke was in the BSD Unix distribution until the suits discovered it and had it removed. Then there was the in-joke values of β will give rise to dom! error diagnostic from the Version 6 mv utility. Dennis Ritchie explains the joke at the link.
Part of the hacker psyche is a delight in playful humor and it’s sad that the sort of droids that used to read Datamation have done everything they can to stamp it out. These days the humor exists—if it exists at all—in the source code where the suits are unlikely to discover it.