Last time I heard it, the first half of the program was corrupted and all that was left was the second half, consisting entirely of closing parentheses.
Another version is that the file was stolen by a malicious hacker and help for ransom. As a proof he had the file, he sent the last part of the file. When one of the programmers saw only ")"s he knew the file was authentic.
Re:Lisp: a cult I almost joined (2005)
by JonnieCache on Friday March 25, 2011 @10:21AM
(#2368521)
Reminds me of the german professor, whose lectures would consist of 40 minutes of nested clauses, then a 20 minute list of verbs.
That makes no sense. Who downloads files from the end up?!
Re:Lisp: a cult I almost joined (2005)
by SamReidHughes on Friday March 25, 2011 @07:13AM
(#2368001)
He had to download it into a linked list so it was only natural to download it from right to left.
Elite hackers from jokes?
An elite hacker broke into a government system and found the code of a secret NASA project. He tried to download it, but the sysadmins noticed the intrusion and eventually cut the hacker off. He only managed to get the last 40 kB of the source file and unfortunately, because the project was written in Lisp, it contained nothing but closing parens.