Programming Language Easter Eggs

Easter eggs are usually hidden inside our games and software, but did you know there are some hidden inside the tools and languages used to make that software? Come with me on a fun Easter diversion while we eat our bodyweight in chocolate, and look at six programming Easter Eggs.

Some of these are from the Python programming language. It seems they had a lot of fun making the language itself and hide quite a lot of random stuff amongst the more sensible parts of the language. However, as we'll discover some of the additions have implications that explain why you don't commonly find hidden surprises in the compilers and tools themselves.

There's a few from the older machines where developers either wanted recognition for their work, or from companies trying to ensure their code wasn't being copied without their permission.

If you have any more, let me know in the comments!

Links
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Credits
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Video by Seb Agora from Pixabay
Video by 3 6 from Pixabay

#programming #eastereggs #basicprogramming #cprogramming #commodore64 #linux #pythonprogramming #python #bbcmicro

[osufdhrfg]

7:10 Yeah that's rather disturbing.

[arronshutt]

"Happy Chocolate Christmas". You know you're in for a treat when your latest video is starting by irreverently downgrading two religious times of year :) I like the NCoT transitions as well. :)

[MSHarvey_Lyricsmith]

I believe the Olivetti M20 had an Easter egg that could invoke an animated bug walking across the screen. I don't know how it was activated though. Some strange key combination.

[LordHonkInc]

"Explicit is better than implicit" coming from a language with dynamic typing is kinda ironic, ngl

[XTronical]

Didn't know about most of them, thanks for collating them together.

[HatStand]

There is a great Easter Egg in MS Excel, version 2000 I think, you enter a formula into a certain cell and the a racing game pops up with the name of the programmes written on the road.

[stephengow]

I'm sure you didn't mean to say Brian Kernigan wrote the language and not just the book

[CallousCoder]

I may want to have a look into the C64 easter egg, do you mind if I download your video and show that scene in a video examining this?

[anon_y_mousse]

I pronounce GIF with a hard G also, but I prefer to pronounce GNU as Guh-New. If the one thing they changed about Python was to add a keyword such as `end` to terminate a given block instead of having significant whitespace, I would actually use it. I mostly use Bash for simple things, and beyond a certain level of complexity I use either C or C++, depending on how I feel that day.

[CletusJonesURL]

I think you made half the point about the recursion Easter egg in the C book... Weren't you supposed to follow one of the pages which sends you back to the original, thus making a recursion joke?

[nicholasaldridge]

Try RANDOMIZE USR 1234 on a 48k Spectrum...