It would never have seen light of day, but fate intervened. The overlords at NebCorp Heavy Industries and Sundries recently chose to emblogginate and resurrect the long-dead Bad Print thread (pun intended).

Prologue

Back then, thoughts originally appeared encoded in Haskell, prompting the dear reader this way…

you probably didn't know that you needed a bad print function, one that spawns a thread for each character in your string and prints the single character before quitting… well, now that you know that you needed this, i've written one for you

$ cat <<EOF >bad-print.hs
> import qualified Control.Concurrent.Async as A
> import qualified System.Environment as E
>
> main = head <$> E.getArgs >>= A.mapConcurrently putChar
> EOF
$ ghc -threaded -rtsopts -with-rtsopts=-N bad-print.hs
[1 of 1] Compiling Main             ( bad-print.hs, bad-print.o )
Linking bad-print ...

$ ./bad-print 'hello there, world'
h telloehre, world
$ ./bad-print 'oops, i think you meant *hello there, world*'
oops, i tihnk you meant *hello there ,owrld*
$ ./bad-print "that's more like it"
st at'hmore likei t

i wonder what bad print looks like in your language of choice?

… and the original thread begat replies in Rayon, Ruby, Bash, C (repeatedly).

People rapidly converged to Thread Per Character as the one true performance metric for bad print. A Bash version claiming to provide bad print for all Unixen fetched the indignation of a resident ksh user, who filed a defect report that not every Unix comes with Bash installed by default.

They are, of course, all correct in their own ways.

Yours truly contributed their very forgettable version of bad print. Which is why it does not feature here. However for equally forgettable reasons — a large volume of coffee may have been involved — in a fit of wild fancy, that guy flew off on a completely uncalled for tangent and brought forth Bad Matrix. And this guy is not one to shy away from nerdsniping you into code riffing your own bad whatever.

So here it is — Bad Matrix as a function — copied below in its entirety to enjoy safely in your own home, in your own jammies, in your own terminal emulator.

Bad Matrix

bad_matrix() {
    local cols=$(tput cols)
    local rows=$(tput lines)

    __parse_chars() {
        LANG="en_US.UTF-8" sed -e 's/\(.\)/\1\n/g' &
    }

    __maybe_dim() {
        if [[ $(( ${RANDOM} % 3 )) == 0 ]]
        then tput dim
        else tput sgr0
        fi
    }

    __colour_me_matrix() {
        __maybe_dim
        tput setaf 2
    }

    __maybe_goto_Y() {
        local y_pos=$(( ${RANDOM} % ${rows} ))
        if [[ $(( ${RANDOM} % 2 )) == 0 ]]
        then tput cup ${y_pos} 0
        fi
    }

    __print_chars_slowly() {
        while read char;
        do printf "%q" "$char" | sed -e "s/''/ /g" &
        done
    }

    __inject_matrix() {
        local __hundred_common_kanji_apparently="日 一 大 年 中 会 人 本 月 長 国 出 上 十 生 子 分 東 三 行 同 今 高 金 時 手 見 市 力 米 自 前 円 合 立 内 二 事 社 者 地 京 間 田 体 学 下 目 五 後 新 明 方 部 .女 八 心 四 民 対 主 正 代 言 九 小 思 七 山 実 入 回 場 野 開 万 全 定 家 北 六 問 話 文 動 度 県 水 安 氏 和 政 保 表 道 相 意 発 不 党"
        local __rand_chars=$(( 1 + ${RANDOM} % ${cols} ))

        if [[ $(( ${RANDOM} % 3 )) == 0 ]]
        then tput el
        else __maybe_goto_Y
             __colour_me_matrix

             read -n ${__rand_chars} __character_fragment <<<${__hundred_common_kanji_apparently}

             for c in ${__character_fragment}
             do sleep 0.05
                printf "%s " "${c}" > /dev/tty &
             done
        fi
    }

    __print_line_fragment() {
        local __rand_chars=$(( 1 + ${RANDOM} % ${cols} ))
        while read -n ${__rand_chars} line ;
        do sleep 0.5
           __maybe_goto_Y
           __inject_matrix
           tput dim
           printf "%s\n" "$( __parse_chars <<<"${line}" | __print_chars_slowly )" &
        done
    }

    cat /dev/urandom  | __print_line_fragment
}

Epilogue

The resurrected thread caused a fellow Recurser to emit a bad_cat in Rust. I'm not sure of this choice of tool. Being a famously memory safe language, I worry they will be unable to write a truly bad bad cat. But I could be wrong. Interested parties may peruse of their issues on Github.

Fin.