Don’t forget the function name at the very beginning!

:(){ :|:& };:

mine would be something like

    p { color: red; }

as a teenager my mind was blown as I reloaded the page and there it was; text now in red. I did that!

Most definitely the juvenile phrases.

I think my second BASIC program was the "guess a number" one -- that seemed really popular in intro basic programming things in the 80s also since it showed keyboard input and conditionals and was, uh, fun-adjacent.

The reason that "Hello, World" is a C thing is that C is the source of the tradition around that phrase. In Kernighan and Richie's "The C Programming Language" printing "Hello, World" is the very first exercise.

Concur. Us hackers who got started with BASIC had a more fun and creative ethos.

My first shipped code was an art thing. C64 Basic. Poke random characters to random locations on the screen. Random colors, screen and border too. On infinite goto loop. Radio Shack (IIRC) in the local mall used it on all their C64s.

if you're using firefox, you can generally juts ctrl-click on the page. It'll draw outlines around every child element without reflowing.

Here are 3 lines that capture something profound about Lisp: code can manufacture code that manufactures code:

———————

(defmacro twice (form)

  `(progn ,form ,form))

(twice (print "Reality"))

———————

twice doesn’t execute its argument twice. It rewrites the program itself before execution into:

(progn

    (print "Reality") 

    (print "Reality"))

Hmm. What a great question.

    while(1) { fork(); } 

Must have meant something to me, because it was in my Usenet sig. And then:

    exit(main(kfp->kargc, argv, environ));

from FreeBSD crt0; kind of a big moment for me to realize there was more C code underneath main().

Then:

    statements: /*E*/ | statement statements

The moment Yacc clicked for me; that line was profound but a more accurate depiction of the moment was realizing that all you were doing with the parser generator was building a tree, and that's what the side effects of each production were for: returning and plugging in tree nodes.

If there was a single line I could come up with for "double the size of the hash table when it fills up", that'd deserve a slot here.

Then, of course (we get to cheat because assembly):

    jmp .call
    .pop: pop esi
    ...
    .call: call .pop

The "delta offset" trick, which I believe came from x86 virus culture but was universal in 90s overflow exploits as a way to get position-independent references to strings and other memory things.

For sure:

    void walk(node *n) { if(!n) return; walk(n->left); visit(n); walk(n->right); }

I should figure out a way to fit a write-select(2) into a line because that's another "oh shit" moment for me.

Similarly: when Vern Paxson explained to me that he'd implemented TCP reassembly by simply opening up a file and using "seek" to place incoming segments in the right position. I could probably golf that down to a line! But it would be an annoying line.

Such a lovely article. Thanks for sharing.

This tiny batch script allowed for a poor man’s `touch` on Windows, which I used extensively from Windows NT to Windows 7. I typed `touch filename.txt` in the Total Commander mini-shell to quickly generate new, empty files.

This is funny to me, because I associate touch more with updating the timestamp of an existing file, and that script would miserably (destructively) be failing at that.