Grotesque Pictures of Programmers We Published in a Fit of Madness

It's a truism that form follows function (I think I'm in the wrong comment - M McLuhan). Weightlifters, for example, tend to have beefy arms and grooves in their chests where they've burst their big red faces live on stage and collapsed backwards with the bar hurtling into their clavicle. Zebras have stripes so they look a bit like grass from a distance to a cheetah, which itself has spots in case the zebra is peering back. Satsumas behave like bits of fruit.

It's not entirely stupefying then that when you consider the principal attributes of a programmer, which are (a) being good at sums; (b) a sedentary working lifestyle; and (c) hair, pictures of programmers tend towards the wobbling and hairy. This is perfectly fine and a natural result of evolutionary and sociological processes. Such people perform a valuable service by rewriting Sokoban again, or updating some graphics on an annual basis, and should be applauded while rightly remaining occluded behind canvas screens lest they scatter the populace and upset the beasts of the field.

Inexplicably, the first year or so of AP's existence celebrated the hard work of these wizards of the squiggly bracket by accompanying articles or interviews not, as you might expect, with photographs of gambolling lambs or a kitten admiring an ice-cream floating in a sunny sky, but with pictures of the featured programmers themselves; the terrifying practice culminating in AP10's cover photograph of Graftgold looking as if they were about to be thwarted by the Double Deckers. Official figures showed twelve dead. (Unofficial figures also showed twelve dead, but without the stamp of binding authority.)

A month later, this leering flap-lip of braying insanity was topped in the enforced-closure-of-newsagents stakes by the cover of AP11, which displayed the grotesque picture of a software company executive as the main image of the cover. (Previously, these photographs had been limited to a small corner, which is a bit like saying you've only set half a fire.) Over three hundred readers tore out their own hips rather than remain at eye-level with the mag on the shop shelf.

This, for AP, was the turning point. The responsible parties were taken out and quietly machine-gunned and never again would photographs of anyone but our lovely selves appear in the magazine, except when we forgot.