According to sources within Apple’s Software and Applications divisions, there is a rampant culture of PILC hunting among the company’s programmers.
PILC (or Programs I’d Like to Code) hunters receive erotic gratification from the coding – or even just the thought of coding – certain programs. To satisfy their base urges, Apple programmers have taken to passing around particularly juicy requirements documents that detail the user need, use case scenarios and a technical overview of how the program should be implemented.
“Some of these requirements docs are so hot,” said an Apple programmer who spoke under the condition of anonymity.
“I saw one the other day that I’d really like to code. Oh, man, would I like to code that. I’d like to code that multiple times. In front of other people. It was that hot.”
While PILC hunting was certainly not invented at Apple and, in fact, has been around since the earliest days of programming, it is a cancer that the company must root out, say experts.
“The objectification of software applications is demeaning,” said Tim O’Reilly of O’Reilly Media.
According to O’Reilly, the situation is exacerbated by the object-oriented nature of modern programming languages.
“These programmers start out being required to objectify their programs,” O’Reilly said. “Sure, it starts off as simply encapsulating data into reusable objects, but the next thing you know you’re ogling UML diagrams. Some of these guys really get their rocks off on it.”
Indeed, as most of Apple’s code is written in Objective C, nearly all of its programs have been objectified by randy developers.
“I know that’s how it’s supposed to be done,” O’Reilly added. “But it’s still disgusting.”
Senior Vice President of Software Engineering Bertrand Serlet and Senior Vice President of Applications Sina Tamaddon have vowed repeatedly to put an end to PILC hunting at Apple. But Serlet was embroiled in controversy recently when his name was associated with several postings to a “HOT_PILCS” user group under the name “CHARLES-DE-BALL”, although no one really knows what that’s supposed to mean.
Apple declined to comment for this story and, frankly, we can’t blame them.