Conversations on the ballroom dance floor tonight

[dr4b]

[with CGS]

"I totally get what you're saying. Followers are compilers."
"No, followers are interpreters, and leaders are programmers."
"Right! And each step is a different programming language..."
"Yeah... so the leader decides on an order of steps and the interpreter executes their half of it."
"So if you lead something that I don't know how to do, that's a syntax error."
"Totally!"
"But if you lead something I know how to do and it's a bad lead and I do something else, THAT is a bug."
"Right. Now the problem is when you get a bad lead and don't do anything. That's halting."
"And sometimes we crash, even with a good lead..."
"And then we have to stop and reboot the system."

[later]

"I've figured out how to explain why that move doesn't work to you, actually."
"Hmmm?"
"Quickstep is a subtype of Foxtrot. Or maybe it's vice versa. Either way..."
"Same basic step, same 4-count, at half the speed."
"Yeah, so here's the deal. You can do pretty much any quickstep move in foxtrot. But you CAN'T do any waltz step in foxtrot. They're not type-safe."
"HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA"
"Uh, watch out, we're going to crash again."

[with E]

"Yeah, I'm too lazy to come to lessons. That and I never get home in time from work for any of them."
"I've been meaning to ask, what do you do, anyway?"
"I'm a software engineer."
"You are? Me too."
"WHAT"
"Well, I'm a code tester at Microsoft."
"That's AWESOME! I work at General Electric... I write Perl so other people don't have to write Cobol."
"You what? Aren't you too young to write Cobol?"
"Uh, nevermind. What group are you in at Microsoft?"

[later, I tell him the programming/dancing joke CGS and I came up with]

"You're a pretty good compiler, then. Shame I don't know how to program in Swing."
"[pause] I hate you."
"You know, I never would have guessed you were a software engineer."
"You've got to be kidding me. Most people tag me as a geek pretty quickly."
"Well, okay, you've got a point there."
"But most people here, if I tell them I'm a software engineer, have no idea what that is, and think I fix people's computers."
"You mean those old dudes, right?"


In other words, despite it being a fairly empty place tonight -- I think there was some other event going on this weekend -- and a lot of the people I usually dance with weren't there -- I still had a pretty good time. Because I got to geek out. I haven't geeked out at ballroom since like, my senior year at CMU.

Comments

[rehana.livejournal.com]

From one dance class I was in: "Ok, he's trying to go this way, and she's trying to go that way, so take the cross product and what do you get?"
Two of us immediately point up.
(He meant to say vector sum, of course.)

[eub.livejournal.com]

That sounds pretty darn cool. I'm glad there's a geek-ballroom community available.

[bhudson.livejournal.com]

Dancers and climbers both.

My WFR instructor mentioned how the Glascow Coma Scale guys were clearly FORTRAN programmers, given that each item is numbered 1 to n.

[katybeth]

That could almost get me into ballroom. I generally claim that modern square dancing is the geekiest form of dance.

[dr4b]

Most of ballroom is NOT this geeky after college, actually, which is why these conversations were a rare and fortuitous find.

[cellio]

"You're a pretty good compiler, then. Shame I don't know how to program in Swing."
"[pause] I hate you."

*laugh*

[bayareajenn.livejournal.com]

I envisioned these conversations done like the "At the Dance" scenes from the Muppet Show.