Night Watch keeps getting better

James Mickens’ column in usenix magazine keeps getting better.  This month’s riff on systems programmers is spot-on.  Here is a representative excerpt:

I need mission-critical people; I need a person who can wear night-vision goggles
and descend from a helicopter on ropes and do classified things to protect my freedom while country music plays in the background. A systems person can do that.

Or, this one:

When it’s 3 A.M., and you’ve been debugging for 12 hours,  and you encounter a virtual static friend protected volatile  templated function pointer, you want to go into hibernation and  awake as a werewolf and then find the people who wrote the  C++ standard and bring ruin to the things that they love. The  C++ STL, with its dyslexia-inducing syntax blizzard of colons and angle brackets, guarantees that if you try to declare any reasonable data structure, your first seven attempts will result  in compiler errors of Wagnerian fierceness:
Syntax error: unmatched thing in thing from std::nonstd::__
map<_Cyrillic, _$$$dollars>const basic_string< epic_
mystery,mongoose_traits &lt; char>, __default_alloc_<casual_
Fridays = maybe>>
One time I tried to create a list<map<int>>, and my syntax  errors caused the dead to walk among the living.

It just keeps getting better.  Read the whole thing.