Back in my early coder days, there came this New Guy. And the New Guy was about average technically but thought he knew everything better than everyone. He would argue endlessly, right or wrong, and would visibly get upset - face red and breathing labored - if the argument didn’t go his way.

I didn’t like New Guy. Nobody did.

One day, I’m sitting to the New Guy’s left. A friend of mine is on New Guy’s right. Call him Right-guy. I have an idea.

I am going to ask a really, really stupid technical question - over New Guy’s head, directed at Right Guy. I don’t really know where this is going, but feel drawn to some higher purpose I cannot yet quite grasp:

“Can you put a loop … inside another loop?” (For you non-coders, this is a thing called a ‘nested loop’. It’s one of the first things you learn. It’s roughly at the same level of learning about the comma in written English.)

I look at Right Guy. Right Guy looks back at me, a puzzled WTF? expression. I just look at him with a wide-eyed inquisitive smirk.

And by some miracle, some act of inspired fucking genius - Right Guy instantly realizes what I’m doing and plays along.

“No, that’s a syntax error.”

And I add, “Yea - because when the compiler is inside of both loops, it doesn’t know, like, which loop you’re inside of.”

New Guy starts objecting and turning red and we just sit calmly and say things like,
“Yea, even if the compiler allowed it, the behavior is undefined.” and “In any case it’s really bad coding style.”

New Guy blew a fuse. We never yielded.

Next day it was recursion.

New Guy didn’t last.