[OK bfk, itās a meme but imma interpret that as a serious question, cos I got thinking and now Iām writingā¦ Iāve not slept for 3 days and Iām happily deliriousā¦ back at the top again, and this turned out to be an amusing and even interesting document of reflection and funny path for a train of thought, to me at least. 
]
The sorts of nonsense names that look like something youād in old hacker movies that were so unrealistic, that if you were to employ mandatory screenings of such movies as a means of resolving employee disputes, attendance, or performance concerns in general, specifically in the system and server administrator departments of dead-end small to medium sized offices, it may well actually be the most effective punitive action ever deployedā¦ so long as it is only for that class of technology enthusiast that have internalised an understanding of how computers, operating systems, and programming languages actually work to the level of moral righteousness in their ego, and especially so in that subclass that raised it to the level of holy scripture, and joke about it being so despite actually really meaning it behind the fragile passive aggressive guise they claim is humour, to justify what simply a case of an insecure, egotistical arsehole).
[OK I am actually going somewhere with this that circles back to the memeā¦]
I based the above stereotype on the personalities of about 10 actual system and server administrators Iāve had the displeasure of working with in small to medium companies over the yearsā¦ I have a theory that it is in those small to medium companies that failed programmers and failed higher level system and server administrators go to become deeply unhappy people, that manage to carve out a niche of control over a computer system, while actually being quite bad at their jobs, and frequently pretended to know that they were doing, but actually made a dogās meal out of it, but were in a siloed and isolated enough space, where they became their own gatekeepers, and can keep the actual experts and honest professionals away, so management never actually understand how badly operated their systems are, in order to protect their fragile egos and pretend to be basically Neo in their server rooms, surrounded by random parts that can could be interpreted as their equivalent to pirate treasure, where Neo has the long hair and personal hygiene of a pirateā¦
[So how this feeds into the question in the memeā¦ itās just a very long way around to itā¦]
Itās just the ācoolā programmer aesthetic isnāt it, and they probably learned basic C or C-influenced languages like PHP and Perl, from a young enough age to be forming foundational ideas of coolness and crucial aspects of their ego, before ever realising that bad, unreadable naming conventions like single letter variables and much of the C standard library, have been a bad idea since the 1980s. They only made sense back when languages like C and its precursors like BCPL were developed in the 60s on old PDP-11 machines, when more readable naming conventions actually made the source code too big, and when computer terminals were 80 characters wide.
I did exactly this when I was 11 and started learning C, PHP, Perl, playing with assembly languages, and over in school writing silly VBScripts on the school computers to annoy teachers and other kids. I did the whole green text on a black background in CMD, I intentionally wrote code that made heavy use of single letter names, in combination with nigh on nonsensical portmanteaus, because I picked up the idea that it looks cool, because the hardcore programmers of times gone got on building revolutionary systems like UNIX doing just that, and now the traces of the practical limitations of the past permeate all of modern tech stacks, except modern programming languages themselves; and the people that are still alive from back then grew out of bad naming conventions long, long agoā¦
If you factor in that theyāre making āIDMā, a self-professed, āintelligentā genre, that says something about the propensity for arroganceā¦ I mean, just look at what Iāve written above?! Iām still an arrogant guy that tries to work it all out and talk about it sometimes with a passive aggressively, intellectualised tingeā¦
