rangeCheck's implementation is a baby step above "Hello World". Oracle's lawyer stood up in front of a judge and jury and tried to claim that that function and Joshua Bloch's admission that he copied it was evidence of Google's guilt. Basically, he tried to take advantage of their lack of domain knowledge to fool them into thinking this was a real Thing Worth Deliberating. Turns out his ploy failed since the judge knew wtf he was talking about and actually codes.
A (flawed) analogy would be if it were a case around the copyright infringement of a book whereby the author, at a new company, copied the phrase "Table of Contents" from a previous novel and pasted it into his new book's table of contents at the head of the page. Anyone with half a brain that understands the domain of writing realizes this is elementary and outside of the scope of what constitutes real, novel IP. Arguing such a point reveals you want to exploit the ignorance of your audience to not know that "Table of Contents" is a phrase used in the industry and obvious to come up with on your own to describe that part of the book. Basically, once the jig is up and the audience knows you're full of it, every claim you make downstream from there ("I know it would take me months to be able to write rangeCheck") makes you look even worse.
The reason this is memorable to me is it makes it as transparent as one could hope as to who in the room was arguing based upon reality, and who was arguing to win. For a software company to do this is an embarrassment since we are supposed to be increasing computer literacy not exploit computer illiteracy to our own advantage.
A (flawed) analogy would be if it were a case around the copyright infringement of a book whereby the author, at a new company, copied the phrase "Table of Contents" from a previous novel and pasted it into his new book's table of contents at the head of the page. Anyone with half a brain that understands the domain of writing realizes this is elementary and outside of the scope of what constitutes real, novel IP. Arguing such a point reveals you want to exploit the ignorance of your audience to not know that "Table of Contents" is a phrase used in the industry and obvious to come up with on your own to describe that part of the book. Basically, once the jig is up and the audience knows you're full of it, every claim you make downstream from there ("I know it would take me months to be able to write rangeCheck") makes you look even worse.
The reason this is memorable to me is it makes it as transparent as one could hope as to who in the room was arguing based upon reality, and who was arguing to win. For a software company to do this is an embarrassment since we are supposed to be increasing computer literacy not exploit computer illiteracy to our own advantage.