If I found the source code for the Universe, the first thing I'd do:

[chacham]

Fix all the bugs

 36/7%

Add a backdoor

 41/8%

Remove any backdoors

 10/2%

Make clean; make install

 32/6%

Make myself root

 141/26%

Understand 42

 68/13%

Add features

 21/4%

Make life simpler

 28/5%

Upgrade

 11/2%

Rewrite it in perl 6

 24/4%

Post it to Wikileaks

 31/6%

Merge branches

 4/1%

Translate the comments

 17/3%

Other choice

 74/14%

538 total votes

[SuicideJunkie]

Make a backup before messing around, and then patch that memory leak called entropy.

[perldigious]

Best analogy I've heard in a long time.

Entropy is really just a memory leak in the universe, great sub-theory for the "we live in a computer simulation" folks!

[perldigious]

Check to see if the entire thing is wrapped inside of a while(1) loop or not. And if not, check what's in the END block.

[BrowserUk]

Re-write the section of code responsible for producing my timeline, so that I came back in my early 20s, whilst remembering everything I know now.

[perldigious]

You may want to include a subroutine that gets called to supply you with more wealth/resources whenever you run too low. That way you can focus on things that interest you entirely without the daily minutia of getting by in modern society distracting you. I don't know about you, but I was dirt poor and drowning in student loans back in my early twenties. :-)

[BrowserUk]

supply you with more wealth/resources whenever you run too low

I firmly believe that if I knew back then, what I know now, the money would have taken care of itself. Or not :)

[Ratazong]

Probably the noblest task would be to start re-writing it in LISP (as it should have been done in the beginning ...)

[Erez]

Change all the tabs to spaces and re-indent it to K&R.

[swampyankee]

Do I really want to be the maintenance programmer for this bodged up Universe?

No!

[ExReg]

Read the EULA.

Make sure equipment I have can compile and run it.

Compile and run it in a VM.

Vow to never touch a computer again after realizing how many souls I killed during the last test run.

[salva]

idkfa

[Discipulus]

++salva for such (unknown to me) slang!

but i'd just be happier painting some red

L*

[hippo]

I voted for "Make life simpler" because it is closest to the specific change I would make: eliminate turbulence.

[hdb]

Rewrite it in perl 6

It is written in Perl already!

[BillKSmith]

I once had a very wise boss who lamented the lack of a universal "do_what_I_mean" macro. He soon recognized the shortcoming of such a thing and proposed a "do_what_is_appropriate" macro. If such a macro (or function) exists in this newly discovered code, it is either "buggy" or under utilized. We could use that copy to correct itself. Should we trust it to do that? We could use the corrected version to update all the source code. (Better keep a backup. I suspect we would not be happy with the result.)

[Linicks]

I would:

rm -rf all_religion

Nick

[GotToBTru]

The existence of source code would provide incontrovertible evidence for the existence of a Programmer. So, logically, if you want to remove all references to religion, you'd start by erasing the source code.

[Lotus1]

How do you equate a programmer to religion? Maybe the programmer had a mom and dad. Maybe the programmer is a creature made of dark matter left over from the previous big bang who created everything in an attempt to end itself.

[shmem]

Other choice. Implement the magic goto to have another chance if all went havoc. And make compassion an inherent attribute of every subject, growing with it's programmatic weight. And rewrite the Makefile for warfare so it deals out death, destruction, pain and grief equally to either side.

[ateague]

1. Take backups
2. Check it into version control
3. Gather up a team to start writing unit/integration/smoke/regression tests

[swampyankee]

Since the source code is probably a) badly commented and b) insanely bodged up, I think we'd need to refactor the entire code base.

A smaller task would be to debug the source code for human cognition. Can we try to remove the one for willful ignorance?

[Anonymous Monk]

Exterminate!

[fishy]

I would set many breakpoints at regular intervals, remove concurrency and ignore exceptions.

[wjw]

Now that I think about it, I would probably run Perl::Tidy on it....

Only then would I set about driving myself insane trying to find the subroutine for humanity. Of course, I would attempt to make a couple of backups and then check the whole thing into Github with the best intention of letting everyone else play too...almost certainly bringing servers around the world down, thus ending open source as we know it...

Yeah..... well, maybe I would just look at it and leave it alone. Yeah, I think that would be wise...

[stevieb]

Completely eliminate the Human virus so that the universe would be back in proper balance.

[gregor42]

fork

[james28909]

I think "Understanding 42" went over my head.

[Athanasius]

Hello james28909,

It’s a reference to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, in which

... a race of hyper-intelligent pan-dimensional beings ... built a computer named Deep Thought to calculate the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything. When the answer was revealed to be 42, Deep Thought explained that the answer was incomprehensible because the beings didn't know what they were asking. It went on to predict that another computer, more powerful than itself would be made and designed by it to calculate the question for the answer....

The computer, often mistaken for a planet (because of its size and use of biological components), was the Earth, and was destroyed by Vogons to make way for a hyperspatial express route five minutes before the conclusion of its 10-million-year program.

Hope that helps, :-)

[james28909]

That is a pretty wild scenario. Wish I could change my answer lol.

[BrowserUk]

See The meaning of life is...