Of all the arcane methods of debugging code this is probably the most productive and enjoyable. When all else fails the rotary debugger will invariably focus your mind on the problem at hand. Quite simply the Debugger is a fresh pizza delivered straight to your workstation. No matter how impenetrable your code is the mere act of ordering a pizza will begin to clear the clouds of confusion. As you study the source with the cheese congealing atop your debugger beside you the answer will become clear.

I once found a link at the bottom of a HTML document containing instructions for ordering pizza for the programmer rather than any monetary contributions, apparently people from as far away as Germany had ordered pizza for the coder. If I ever release any of my own code into the wild... trust me it will have just such a comment.

The programmer mentioned by FelonyMPulse is Andrew Tridgell, the originator of Samba, which allows *nix systems to participate in Microsoft's SMB/CIFS networking. Samba is GPL'ed, but Andrew mentioned the pizza thing "as a bit of a joke" even in the earliest documentation. Over the years, he has been the recipient of many well-deserved pizzas. This is no small achievement, since he lives in Canberra, Australia.

From the Samba Meta-FAQ:

2.11 Pizza supply details

Those who have registered in the Samba survey as "Pizza Factory" will already know this, but the rest may need some help. Andrew doesn't ask for payment, but he does appreciate it when people give him pizza. This calls for a little organisation when the pizza donor is twenty thousand kilometres away, but it has been done.

  1. Ring up your local branch of an international pizza chain and see if they honour their vouchers internationally. Pizza Hut do, which is how the entire Canberra Linux Users Group got to eat pizza one night, courtesy of someone in the US.
  2. Ring up a local pizza shop in Canberra and quote a credit card number for a certain amount, and tell them that Andrew will be collecting it (don't forget to tell him.) One kind soul from Germany did this.
  3. Purchase a pizza voucher from your local pizza shop that has no international affiliations and send it to Andrew. It is completely useless but he can hang it on the wall next to the one he already has from Germany :-)
  4. Air freight him a pizza with your favourite regional flavours. It will probably get stuck in customs or torn apart by hungry sniffer dogs but it will have been a noble gesture.

rot13 = R = round tape

rotary debugger n.

[Commodore] Essential equipment for those late-night or early-morning debugging sessions. Mainly used as sustenance for the hacker. Comes in many decorator colors, such as Sausage, Pepperoni, and Garbage. See ANSI standard pizza.

--The Jargon File version 4.3.1, ed. ESR, autonoded by rescdsk.

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