What code DOESN’T do in real life (that it does in the movies)

1. Code does not move
In films and television code is always sailing across the screen at incredible speeds; it’s presented as an indecipherable stream of letters and numbers that make perfect sense to the programmer but dumbfound everyone else.

Je mets une croix rouge dans mon calendrier, cet article a des commentaires qui apportent quelque chose. Il y a deux ou trois autres choses particulièrement agaçantes qui y sont soulignées :

It drives me crazy to see a movie or TV character sit down at a computer they have never seen before, tap a few keystrokes, access the entire contents of the suspect’s hard drive, find the exact file they need, and display it in the precise format they need (« find all the left-handers who recently bought a Toyota »).

You will always see some police officer looking over a « computer whiz »‘s sholder and he says « Hey enhance that surveillance camera image ». And then you hear bleppity bleep and zooming then pixilization then some more zooming and some depixilization and tadaaaaa. Like magic, the crappy 0.00001 pixel cam produces a 200 mega pixel detailed shot of the criminals eye lashes.

They also have these totally unrealistic GUIs that seem to always have exactly the perfect app for whatever extremely specific scenario is happing.