They grind up cows to make glue. Do they grind up fresh-out-of-college software engineers to glue software together?

One of the things that hurt most in 5 Centimeters Per Second was that Tōno worked as a computer programmer before, basically, giving up on life. You can see him writing PHP pretty clearly here:

Maybe he should’ve found a job using Python. (Then again, this is Japan, so from what I understand, he’s lucky to not be writing COBOL?)

Meanwhile, MIPS randomly appears in Serial Experiments Lain, which was fun to see as I was enrolled in a class based on MIPS at the time:

Turns out, the show also contains Common Lisp and other references to programming, fittingly enough.