Takeshi: .. and the secret ingredient is.. (dramatic pause) Spaghetti Code!
Iron Chef: *grunts*
Contendor: (eyes wide, staring at the shimmering codebase)
Takeshi: In the immortal words of my uncle: (more dramatic pausing) allez coding!
[...]
Ohta: Fukui-san, the Challenger has broken out a hex editor and is doing regular expression search and replaces on some files.
Fukui: Wow, I've never seen a Challenger get that down and dirty with the code! Usually the assistants get that task.
Ohta: He seems to be stripping all of the Unicode out, leaving just the tender ASCII to work with.
[...]
Ohta: Fukui-san, it looks like Iron Chef may be using perl.
Fukui: No, wait, what's going into that file?
Ohta: Well, a bit of sed, a few greps, and a bunch of pipes.
Iron Chef: And some bash functions.
Fukui: Ah, he must be making a batch file!
[...]
Fukui: And I see that the Contendor has broken out regedit! Let's see what our judges feel about that.
Ditzy Judge: Ooh, I just love it when regedit is used! *giggles
Dour Judge: Well, you have to be careful when using regedit, it's easy to ruin the whole thing!
Fukui: Yes, much like fugu, you have to be careful. We'll see how the Contendor fares. And now, back to the floor.
[...]
Fukui: It looks like the Iron Chef is starting on dessert already. Some sort of unix? I can't quite see the boot loader from here, what flavour is it?
Iron Chef: (mumbles something)
Ohta: Fukui-san, he says he prefers the vanilla unix for this application.
Fukui: Well, there you have it! Vanilla unix. I personally prefer the Mandrake flavour, but with the right modules, the Iron Chef should be able to make a nice showing.
[...]
Contendor: (scowls fiercely at a Blue Screen of Death)
Fukui: Uh, oh. Looks like the Contendor might not be able to finish his sixth application.
Voice From Above: Two minutes remaining.
Contendor: Quick! I need more RAM over here! Then boot it up quick! Safe mode, it might be faster!
[...]
Takeshi: Contendor, please present your next codebase.
(camera zooms in on MacBook)
Contendor: This is a user interface based on one I learned from my grandmère.
Dour Judge: Yes, I see it looks rustic, and has the word "Procomm" on it.
Contendor: Exactly. Although the outside looks like a MacBook, it's using BootCamp to run XP, Virtual PC from that to run Linux, and DOSEmu to run MS-DOS 3.3, to use a terminal emulator to connect to that Vax over in the corner.
Ditzy Judge: Ooh, kind of like a terducken?
Contendor: (chuckles) I was thinking of a multi-layered twinkie, but, sure, like a terducken.
Dour Judge: (types a few lines) Even the 300 baud connection feels like 110 baud. Too many layers of software are making it feel exceptionally tough to use.
Ditzy Judge: Yes, I agree, for this application something simpler would have been nice. There are just too many competing OSes here.
Contendor: (bows head sadly)
* Show persona: Fukui is the commentator, Ohta, the guy on the floor.