Other (useless) programming techniques

Some people believe next techniques are useful. But no one knows actually. Marked (*) items are translation of BSD programming memo. Original Copyright (C) 1996 Tomoaki Tada (niggle), Appendix by candy 2002.10.09.

• Stay up all night (*)
  The programming technique which is used just before a deadline. Too frequently use of this technique causes danger of programmer's life. (= Karoushi) The effectiveness of this technique is usually low. However, thanks to the love of fortune, sometimes these programmers get an email entitled ``deadline extended.''
• Eye-grep (*)
  This is a common technique, when a programmer should use a non-familiar environment. The programmer emulates the grep program himself/herself. The speed is quite slow and sometimes fail to match the pattern since this is an emulation. One advantage is the programmer can use more flexible regular expressions than any other environments.
• Mumbling (*)
  A basic technique of programmers. Under any circumstances including coding and debugging, a programmer talks himself/herself to reorder her/his ideas. Too much usage is dangerous when you have people surrounded.
• Shouting (*)
  A necessary technique of programmers. An example situation is that a programmer find a bug which cause is totally unknown. This is useless for the debugging itself, however, there is a side effect to break the other people's concentration.
• Perfect (*)
  A fundamental spell for programmers. When coding is finished, the programmer recites this word. However, this is usually never true, then other people will heard at least several ten times of this word.
• The deep love (*)
  A middle level technique of programmers. Even most of people cannot run a program correctly, the programmer only can run his/her program using this technique. This is quite effective for the demonstration. (synonym: Do not touch this button. Do not select the n-th item of the menu. Don't move the mouse cursor now.)
• It's weird. It worked before. (*)
  The basic spell when you must demonstrate the program the others (e.g., customers) which does not work yet.
• Specification
  The basic spell when your customer complains your bug. Usage: It is not a bug. It is a specification of the standard X...
• printf debug
  The fundamental debugging technique. (synonym: cout debug) However, this is not so effective for kernel debugging and GPU programming.
• OpenGL techniques
  • glDisable(GPU_FAN)
    To disable the noisy GPU fan. (I first heard this technique from Stefan Brabec.)
  • glEnable(SHADOW)
    (synonym: glEnable(RAYTRACING), glEnable(RADIOSITY), glEnable(CAUSTICS), and so forth)