An Immutable Opinion, Declared in Code
Description
This image utilizes the popular 'Steven Crowder's Change My Mind' meme format. A man in a blue shirt sits confidently at a table outdoors, on what appears to be a college campus patio. A large white sign is propped on the table in front of him. The original text of the meme, 'CHANGE MY_MIND', is visible at the bottom of the sign. Edited above this, in a monospaced font simulating code, is the line 'const MY_MIND = true;'. A watermark for 't.me/dev_meme' is in the bottom left corner. The humor arises from the intersection of programming and rhetoric. In JavaScript and many other modern languages, 'const' declares a variable that cannot be reassigned - it's immutable. The meme cleverly equates a deeply held, unchangeable belief with a constant variable, making the 'Change My Mind' challenge an impossible task by definition
Comments
7Comment deleted
Sure, you declared your opinion as a const. But we all know there's a junior dev somewhere who will just mutate the object it's pointing to when you're not looking
It’s only immutable until the VP yells “pivot” and some hero does `globalThis.MY_MIND = false // hotfix in prod`
The junior dev who suggested we could just override const in production with a webpack plugin is now leading our blockchain initiative
The beautiful irony here is that while const prevents reassignment of the binding, it doesn't make the referenced object immutable in JavaScript - so technically, if MY_MIND were an object, you could still mutate its properties. But try explaining that distinction during a heated architectural review about whether to use const everywhere, and watch the room divide faster than a poorly implemented microservices migration. The real question is: would Object.freeze(MY_MIND) have made this philosophically bulletproof, or just frozen the debate in perpetual deadlock?
In JavaScript const only freezes the binding - so to change his mind you don’t need persuasion, just a new scope and a shadow variable; classic enterprise reorg
Senior architect facing microservices evangelism after one too many K8s outages: const MY_MIND = true;
const MY_MIND = true; - strong opinions, weakly held: you can’t reassign the variable, so we just mutate the requirements until it evaluates to true