Coworker of mine was complaining: “Man, does this project take forever to build! It’s been 15 minutes and not done yet…” So without looking up from my terminal, I spewed out a checklist to him. “Are you using jikes?” “Yes.” “Is it in your path?” “Yes.” “Is USE_JIKES set in your build environment?” “Yes.” “Are you using fast-recursion compile?” “Yes!” “Are you using jikes in ejbc?” “Yes!!” bla bla bla…
Finally, out of frustration, I yelled “Did you push enter after typing ‘make’???” I get dead silence for 5 seconds, followed by “Ahhhh, is that why the blinking cursor is still on the first line!” [Gene Chuang, December 27, 2001]