If you write SW for a living, you know how painstaking it can be. The last thing you want to do is to code on the fly. Although I understand why Hollywood likes to depict hackers and other misfits as keyboard virtuosos, able to write a complex application in just a few seconds, it may give you a bad reference for the future. To make it simple, writing code is like writing an essay. With a lot more logic constraints that in an article and no credit given for vocabulary. Having this reference should make you more skeptical about what you see on screen. I’ve spotted a few new examples of such code Paganini. The first one is in the solid TV series Mr. Mercedes (2017 – created by David E. Kelley). This show is one of the few adaptations of Stephen King that doesn’t suck. As a side note, the other good and recent adaptation is The Outsider series (2020).
The second spotting happens in Homeland (2011 – 2020). It is not the first time we talk about this TV series here, which is in its last season. I don’t think that the show has jumped the shark yet, and Claire Danes (Carrie Mathison) and Mandy Patinkin (Saul Berenson) are taking us along the ride. In S8:E6 (Two Minutes), we can spot a shady wannabe spy writing teleconference security cracking code using some language I am not familiar with. It is likely nothing real, or he is in the early stage of his on the fly coding.