The Daily WTF

Starting in 1985, a tiny little language called Clipper briefly conquered the world. It was a dBase-derivative, with the bonus that its programs could be compiled and run as stand-alone software on MS-DOS. That meant small programs which couldn’t justify getting time on a mainframe or a minicomputer could be whipped up to run on a desktop. It was popular, and for about a decade, it was everywhere. Then Windows 95 came out, and Clipper refused to pivot to Windows and became a footnote in history.

It mostly worked pretty great, or at least as great as one of those tiny business-focused languages ever got. Unfortunately for Drake, he encountered some issues in the latter days of Clipper in the early 90s.

Drake’s team wrote an image display library for Clipper programs. An end-user of their library complained that it crashed when displaying images. They supplied a sample program that

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