# Programming's Dirtiest Little Secret DevFeed: [Programming's Dirtiest Little Secret]() Original publisher: [Read original article]() Author: Steve Yegge (noreply@blogger.com) Published: 2008-09-10T23:59:00Z Content type: opinion Language: en Sources: [Steve Yegge]() Topics: [Programming]() Tags: [programming]() ## AI overview An opinion article begins a personal, humorous story about a teenager choosing a typing elective in 1982. The supplied excerpt does not yet state the article's broader argument about programming. ## Source excerpt "And as for this non-college bullshit I got two words for that: learn to fuckin' type" -- Mr. Pink This is another one I've wanted to write forever. Man, I've tried a bunch of times. No ruck. Not Rucky. Once again I'm stuck feeling so strongly about something that I'm tripping over myself trying to get my point across. So! Only one thing left to try: bust open a bottle of wine and see if that gets the ol' creative juices flowing all over my keyboard. Rather than top-down, which is boring, let's go bottoms-up. Once upon a time... ...in, uh, let's see... it was about 1982. Yeah. A looooong time ago. This is practically a fairy tale. Once upon a time in '82, there was this completely hypothetical fictitious made-up dorky 12-year-old kid named Yeev Staigey, who was enduring his sophomore year at Paradise High School in Paradise, California. Yeev had skipped 3rd, 7th and 8th grades and entered high school at age 11, in a heroic and largely successful effort to become socially inept for the rest of his life. Boy, I could tell you all sorts of stories about little Yeev at that age. He was even lamer and more pathetic than you're probably already imagining. However, our story today concerns Yeev's need to take a, um, an... elective of some sort. I'm not sure what they called it, but at Yeev's school, you couldn't just take math and science and languages and history and all that boring stuff. No! Yeev was being educated in the United States of America, so he had to take "electives", which were loosely defined as "Classes Taught by the Football Coach because Some Law Said that Football Coaches Had to Teach A Course Other Than Football." These "electives" (which you could "elect" not to take, in which case they would "elect" not to graduate you) were the kinds of courses that put the "Red" in Red-Blooded American. These were courses like Wood Shop, Metal Shop, Auto Shop, and of course that perennial favorite, Just Chop Your Hand Off For Five Credits Shop. At the time our story