what's in a name?
"Noop"
Like urm "No-Op"?
Yes those were the day's weren't they... stick in a few no-ops to slow down
the code so the hardware could catch up and the display doesn't flicker so much.
I know, I know there's a growing tendency of bloat in code, simple tasks taking longer and longer to execute, hello_world now compiling to multi-megabytes when it used to work in 50bytes.. and yes... asymptotic trends and all that, but are they taking the micky?
A: "what are you programing in?"
B: "no-op - It's the final generation of computer languages, you put in 10 man-years of a beautifully commented code the size of wikipedia, and the intricate "just-too late" (TM) compilation and code optimisation cycles back and forward over it performing rigorous testing procedures until there the whole code has been reduced to the absolutely perfect human-machine interface and at the end of the process gives you your pay-packet and a beer or coffee depending on your colour scheme."
A: "But what does the code do?"
B: "It uses up programmer's time until 5pm Friday, while maximizing the lines of code and minimising the out of hours debugging time as the deadline approaches, because it's impossible to write buggy noop code!"
A: "Yes, but what's the code for?"
B: "I told you. It's written in NoOp. Once written the code can be applied to anything you like,
You know, like ID card schemes that'll get trashed just before delivery, biometric passport face scanners, airliner mounted laser cannons that can deliver a laser bolt almost as effective as a small calibre rifle bullet, things like that... Anything that'll never do anything useful...
You know - anything where there's the chance of a sane human being at the end of the line deciding that they can do things 1000 times better themselves and ignore what the computer's doing"
A: You mean it wastes time
B: LIke I said, it's in noop.