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Pokémon for Programmers: The Evolution of Char to String
Languages Post #2125, on Oct 6, 2020 in TG

Pokémon for Programmers: The Evolution of Char to String

Description

A screenshot of a tweet from user Jen Gentleman (@JenMsft). The tweet, posted on September 24, 2020, reads: "If pokemon was written by programmers charmander would evolve into stringmander". The image has a dark background with white text. This is a clever pun that combines the world of Pokémon with fundamental programming concepts. In many programming languages, a 'char' is a data type representing a single character, while a 'string' is a sequence of characters, essentially a more complex structure built from chars. The joke imagines a programmer-designed Pokémon world where the evolution from Charmander (char) to a more advanced form would logically be "Stringmander" (string), playing on the idea of simple types evolving into more complex data structures. It's a niche, witty observation that resonates well with anyone familiar with basic data types

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Languages CS Fundamentals Games DevCommunities

Comments

18
Anonymous ★ Top Pick And its final evolution would be StringBuilder-mander, because immutable strings are a performance bottleneck
  1. Anonymous ★ Top Pick

    And its final evolution would be StringBuilder-mander, because immutable strings are a performance bottleneck

  2. Anonymous

    In the globalized codebase, Charmander doesn’t evolve into Charmeleon - he gets re-encoded into UTF-32mander and suddenly every pokéball needs 4× the heap

  3. Anonymous

    Next thing you know, Pikachu evolves into NullPointerException after trying to dereference itself during a thunderbolt - at least that explains why Ash's Pokemon never seem to follow expected behavior patterns in production

  4. Anonymous

    This is the kind of type evolution that actually makes sense in production - unlike that time we tried to evolve our monolith into microservices and ended up with a distributed ball of mud. At least with Stringmander, you get proper memory allocation and don't have to worry about buffer overflows when it learns Flamethrower

  5. Anonymous

    Final evo? JSON.stringify(Stringmander) - because no type survives the API roundtrip unscathed

  6. Anonymous

    In our repo, Charmander can’t evolve into Stringmander without an explicit toString(), a Unicode RFC link in the PR, and a rollback plan for Charizard’s UTF‑16 surrogate tantrums

  7. Anonymous

    Enterprise Pokédex: Charmander evolves into Stringmander the moment someone changes the “type” column from CHAR(1) to VARCHAR(255) - now even fire is a free‑text field

  8. @CCZeroOne 5y

    But it was written by programmers

  9. @NiKryukov 5y

    Charmander -> char* mander

    1. @Sokolovskiy01 5y

      -> string mander -> string* mander

      1. @dukeabv 5y

        It should be smth like Charmander - Stringmeleon - Arrayizard

        1. @CCZeroOne 5y

          StringBuilderizard

      2. dev_meme 5y

        Into which dict it should evolve afterwards? 🧐

        1. @Sokolovskiy01 5y

          -> string ** mander

        2. @CCZeroOne 5y

          Dictmander<Keymander, Valuemander>

  10. @alexolexo 5y

    CharSequencemander

  11. @jaennil 5y

    char[ ]

  12. @dengleo 5y

    🤣

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