the co founder of stack-overflow Joel Spolsky's Religion is jewish
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000319.htmlSpolsky used a Yiddish joke to illustrate a certain poor programming practice. In the joke, Schlemiel (also rendered Shlemiel) has a job painting the dotted lines down the middle of a road. Each day, Schlemiel paints less than he painted the day before. When he is asked why, Schlemiel complains that it is because each day he gets farther away from the paint can.[13]
The inefficiency to which Spolsky was drawing an analogy was the poor programming practice of repeated concatenation of C-style null-terminated character arrays (that is, strings) in which the position of the destination string has to be recomputed from the beginning of the string each time because it is not carried over from a previous concatenation.
Spolsky condemned such inefficiencies as typical for programmers who had not been taught basic programming techniques before they began programming using higher level languages: "Generations of graduates are descending on us and creating Schlemiel The Painter algorithms right and left and they don't even realize it, since they fundamentally have no idea that strings are, at a very deep level, difficult."[13]
Spolsky's essays have been cited as examples of clear writing "about their insular world in a way that wins the respect of their colleagues and the attention of outsiders."[12]
Shlemiel gets a job as a street painter, painting the dotted lines down the middle of the road. On the first day he takes a can of paint out to the road and finishes 300 yards of the road. "That's pretty good!" says his boss, "you're a fast worker!" and pays him a kopeck.
The next day Shlemiel only gets 150 yards done. "Well, that's not nearly as good as yesterday, but you're still a fast worker. 150 yards is respectable," and pays him a kopeck.
The next day Shlemiel paints 30 yards of the road. "Only 30!" shouts his boss. "That's unacceptable! On the first day you did ten times that much work! What's going on?"
"I can't help it," says Shlemiel. "Every day I get farther and farther away from the paint can!"
