Christopher Parrott
Christopher Parrott is often regarded as the idol for over-zealous engineers worldwide, his ability to obfuscate, forget and redefine the requirements of any task while producing completely superfluous un-maintainable code are second to none.
Battling with the constraints of menial University assignments, some have observed him exhibiting signs of dementia and frustration, often gazing into space for long period, mouthing the words "I want to code Artificial Intelligence Systems, not a HashTable...."
Achievements
- Chris' most famous achievements to date include:
- Grievous bodily harm to the Java Virtual Machine with an eager implementation of an Asteroids game consisting of in excess of 70 class files, each having its own interface. What once started as an innocent assignment set by LyndaThomas turned into a summer love affair, ending with the game having MASSIVE rockets, gravity, swirling vortexes and more. While graphically reasonably impressive, this game will stress and lag on ANY machine unfortunate enough to have the task of running it, including Core 2 Duo processors.
- Immense over-complication of his assembly language assignment, including the circuit design for a custom 7 segment display designed to circumvent using the perfectly suited inbuilt screen of the 68HC11 processor. The number of refreshes needed to provide the illusion that the 7 segment display was maintaining the characters persistently meant that in a simulated environment, it took a matter of minutes for his program to count one second. Also managed to crash multiple computers with this code.
- Assaulting a modestly sized C assignment with all guns blazing, to produce a monolith relational database solution to process under 500 lines of tab separated data in text files
- Trumping Sun's Java programmers with his own implementation of the Hashtable
- Developing his entire solution to a C assignment without compiling or debugging it other than mentally/telepathically, fixing a few errors and saying "finished!".
- Reveling in his glory as GCC's impenetrably composed facade crumbled and begged him to stop with the following plea:
Chris can often be found in the Sun Lounge (getting a tan off the computer screen) now that his laptop has gone to laptop heaven. Official prognosis has identified his stressful code to be the cause of the death of his laptop. After receiving council from the Royal Society for the Protection of Cruelty to Hardware, he has since migrated his workflow to his new, more powerful, paper laptop. He was recently photographed by reporters secretly meeting Phil White, and was reputed to be in talks of purchasing a specially commissioned cardboard box laptop, but has since shunned the idea due to media pressure.
He violently condemns code that can be written in only one line (see Godlike), usually preferring to keep his code to a minimum of 10000 lines.
Testimonials
His source is always four times larger than anyone elses. When you have written 7 class files, he will write 90. Lecturers be afraid, very afraid.