Flying monkeys, meet my nose

When I was a young computer geek, I learned a lot from the comp.lang.c newsgroup. One of the things I learned about was undefined behavior. When you do certain things in C, the result behavior, according to the standard, is undefined. As the old salts (as old as salts can be in a newsgroup about a language that started in the 70s) say, when you do such-and-such, then maybe flying monkeys will come flying out of my nose.

I was just thinking fondly of those days--or more accurately, with mixed feelings. I have a notion that many of those guys were/are my age, and yet they chose to act fairly superciliously, even while sharing their knowledge. I did enjoy learning more about the language, and getting to know the main contributers to the group.

But they were all guys. If I strain, I can maybe remember one other female contributor to the group. There could well have been many, many women who read the group but did not post; that behavior left them completely invisible. That makes me alternately sad and mad.

I'm thrilled that there are more women than ever in software/hardware/IT. I would really like to see our company hire another software engineer who has tatas. Just one. And if flying monkeys come out of my nose, so be it.