While on the subject of sci-fi, I just found this (very) short story on-line, which I really enjoyed. It’ll take you less than five minutes to read, and you’ll be glad you did; go check it out.

It’s been a bad month; first Gary Gygax, and now Arthur C. Clarke.

Eerily, I found these comments, while going through some source code, here at work, yesterday:

    StoreParameterChanges();
 
// Scheduler was written by Ramans. Everything must be done three times...
if ( (m_lLastParamIndex != CB_ERR) && (m_lLastParamIndex != iSel) )
{

    StoreParameterChanges();
 
// Scheduler was written by Ramans. Everything must be done three times...
if ( (m_lLastParamIndex != CB_ERR) && (m_lLastParamIndex != iSel) )
{

    StoreParameterChanges();
 
// Scheduler was written by Ramans. Everything must be done three times...
if ( (m_lLastParamIndex != CB_ERR) && (m_lLastParamIndex != iSel) )
{

Which, as well as being a strange foreshadowing, just goes to show how great a cultural impact he had¹.

1. OK - so a programmer quoting sci-fi isn’t that spectacularly unlikely, but you get the point. [↩]