Thursday, September 13, 2007

Happy Programmer's Day

Happy Programmer's Day to all my friends and geeks.

Programmer's day is a 'holiday' on the 256th day of the year celebrated mostly by computer programmers (reason: 256 = 2 to the power of 8 = the number of values representable in a byte of data). Traditions include drinking, behaving silly, playing Demo Ball, coding silly programs, mini computer games, playing with old computers, etc. That, of course, includes the condition that the developer who chooses to celebrate, needs to have done decent coding on all the other days and had tried the best not to behave silly on the other days. For those programmers who are used to the 'celebrations' in their every day lives, this 'holiday' becomes unjustified! Programmer's day usually falls on September 13th; on leap years, it is September 12th.Some people feel that counting should start from 0. However, even if you count from 0 it does not change the fact that there are still only 256 bits in a byte. Therefore, if you start counting at 0 then the 256th day falls on the number 255 which does not change the day that the holiday falls on.

1 comment:

Vineet Rajan said...

yeah! damn wiki! they deleted the page and they crib about NASA modifying the wiki pages...