To be a mental midget is to be stigmatized, ostracized, socialized, patronized, highly paid.
To be a mental midget is to have everyone controlling the C standard but you. You're watched by me, you, the Sussman, and Kodak Gallery Programmer. And then you're diagnosed as not standard compliant.
To be a mental midget is to live with the constant threat and possibility of being flamed on /prog/ at any time, for almost any reason.
To be a mental midget is to live on $82,000 a month in stock options, which won't let you buy a copy of the C standard, to dry your tears. And to watch your /prog/ come back to his office from lunch, walking in shoes with holes in them.
To be a mental midget is to have a dull mind, deadened senses, jitter and drool and then you take more drugs to "party."
To be a mental midget is to apply for jobs and lie about the last few months or years, because you've been using undefined behavior, and then you get the job anyway because you're a mental midget. To be a mental midget is to matter.
To be a mental midget is never to be taken seriously.
To be a mental midget is to be a resident of a ghetto, surrounded by other mental midgets who are as scared and hungry and bored and successful as you are.
To be a mental midget is to watch /prog/ and see how violent and dangerous and dumb and incompetent and crazy your programs are.
To be a mental midget is to be a statistic.
To be a mental midget is to wear a label, and that label never goes away, a label that says everything about what your programming and even more about who you are.
To be a mental midget is to never to say what you mean, but to sound like you know the C standard.
To be a mental midget is to tell the Sussman he's helping you , even if he is not.
To be a mental midget is to act glad when you're sad and calm when you're informed your program invokes undefined behavior, and to always be "appropriate."
To be a mental midget is to participate in stupid groups that call themselves code review. Overflow isn't acceptable, its undefined; sizeof(int) isn't 4, it's undefined; *(*int) is undefined; race conditions are undefined. Even the air you breathe is undefined and that's called "the milieu."
To be a mental midget is not to leave the textboard, even if you want to -- and not cry, and not hurt, and not be scared, and not be angry, and not be vulnerable, and not to laugh to loud -- because, if you do, you only prove that you are a mental midget even if you are not.
And so you become a no-thing, in a no-world, and you are not a good programmer.