Brawl Over Quotation Marks Breaks Out At Local Startup

BREAKING NEWS: Palo Alto Police were called to local startup Absol today to break up a massive fistfight that erupted over the use of single or double quotes in their company’s codebase.

Tensions among developers at Absol have been building for over a month, starting when an intern suggested using single quotes to demarcate “strings” across all of the programming code that had been written thus far. (While our resident technical expert attempted to explain to the writing staff what a “string” was, we regrettably had no idea what he was talking about). Today, the cafeteria of the Absol building was filled with hundreds of programmers locked in an epic battle for quotation superiority.

We found backend engineer Aaron LeMay holding another engineer in a headlock by the smoothie bar. “Using single quotes for strings is unquestionably useful! It reduces the number of characters in our files and is consistent with the strings in our Python code.” The engineer he was headlocking, Sara Mohammed, executed a jujitsu move and threw LeMay to the ground. “False! The marginal costs of switching our entire existing codebase to single quotes would far outweigh the marginal benefits. Both are sufficiently readable. Say ‘auntie,’ motherfucker!”

A police spokesperson described this sort of disturbance as being extraordinarily common in Palo Alto, an otherwise peaceful town. This fight marked the 42nd incident this year, part of a wave of violence not seen since the dot-com boom of the 1990s. Fights have broken out among rival gangs of developers (whose gang meetings are colloquially referred to as “meetups”) over the use of vim vs. emacs, Python vs. Ruby, and static typing vs. dynamic typing. Indeed, a 25-year-old male was hospitalized last week after being clubbed with a mechanical keyboard in a heated discussion over the merits of using spaces or tabs for indenting code.

As the police began to arrive and pulled apart the throngs of slapfighting engineers, a handful of bizdev and HR employees watched from the sidelines, perplexed. “Why don’t they just use both?” One woman asked. Nobody seemed to hear her.