Ask HN: Anyone know any funny programming jokes?
Can be super esoteric or super generalized, I love it when I get them, or when I just learn something new.
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A man is flying in a hot air balloon and realizes he is lost. He reduces height and spots a man down below. He lowers the balloon further and shouts:
"Excuse me, can you help me? I promised my friend. I would meet him half an hour ago, but I don't know where I am."
The man below says, "Yes, you are in a hot air balloon, hovering approximately 30 feet above this field. You are between 40 and 42 degrees North latitude, and between 58 and 60 degrees West longitude."
"You must be a programmer," says the balloonist.
"I am," replies the man. "How did you know?"
"Well," says the balloonist, "everything you have told me is technically correct, but I have no idea what to make of your information, and the fact is I am still lost."
The man below says, "You must be a project manager"
"I am," replies the balloonist, "but how did you know?"
"Well," says the man, "you don't know where you are or where you are going. You have made a promise which you have no idea how to keep, and you expect me to solve your problem. The fact is you are in the exact same position you were in before we met, but now it is somehow my fault."
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/2rn8qx/i_h...
I say this as a pure engineer who has been a lead many times but never a PM.
A helicopter was flying around above Seattle when an electrical malfunction disabled all of the aircraft's electronic navigation and communications equipment.
Due to the clouds and haze, the pilot could not determine the helicopter's position and course to fly to the airport.
The pilot saw a tall building, flew toward it, circled, drew a handwritten sign, and held it in the helicopter's window. The pilot's sign said "WHERE AM I?" in large letters.
People in the tall building quickly responded to the aircraft, drew a large sign and held it in a building window.
Their sign read: "YOU ARE IN A HELICOPTER."
The pilot smiled, waved, looked at her map, determined the course to steer to SEATAC airport, and landed safely.
After they were on the ground, one of the passengers asked the pilot how the "YOU ARE IN A HELICOPTER" sign helped determine their position.
The pilot responded "I knew that had to be the Microsoft building because, the response they gave me was technically correct, but completely useless."
....The pilot saw a tall building, flew toward it, circled, drew a handwritten sign, and held it in the helicopter's window. The pilot's sign said "WHERE AM I?" in large letters.
People in the tall building quickly responded to the aircraft, drew a large sign and held it in a building window.
The Sign was a stylized picture of the helicopter they were in, with a BIG red arrow pointing towards the pilot's window where a small cartoon pilot held up a sign saying 'WHERE AM I" in a hand-rendered Helvetica font.
The pilot smiled...yadda yadda yadda..
After they were on the ground, one of the passengers asked...
The Pilot responded "Tableau Software"
Lost man in a balloon yells down at a man on the ground “Where am I?”
The man on the ground responds, “You’re in a balloon”
The man in the balloon says “You must be a mathematician”.
“Why?” asks the man on the ground.
“Because your answer is absolutely right and absolutely useless”
I know it soviet style:
A mathematician, a physicist and a biologist are flying in a air balloon and are lost.
They encounter a man walking below:
The biologist asks him: "do you know, where we are?"
"..." the man looks up and says nothing
The physicist ask him: "can you please tell us, where we are!"
"..." after a while the man says: "in a balloon".
The mathematician remarks, ah, he must be a philosopher. The others: "how do you know?"
"Well, for once he needed a lot of time to answer. Then his answer is correct with our objective reality. And lastly, his answer is completely useless to us."
(in eastern soviet republics, philosophy was not in high regards, because the peoples governments were supposed to be philosophical (a la Marx) government, with in theory, very high standards)
The engineer is shocked. -'What, this is like a quarter of what I make in a month - for half an hour's work???'
Plumber shrugs. -'Well, why don't you come join us? Easy work, well paid, no responsibility - just remember to keep mum about your degree, as we're not supposed to hire academics.'
Our engineer contemplates this for a while, applies for a job as a plumber - and gets it.
All is well, good money, no responsibilites - until management requires that they take evening school classes to gain new skills and thus better build socialism. So, grudgingly, our engineer enrolls in a math class and, upon arriving, finds that the teacher wants to establish what the plumbers already know.
-'You over there - could you please come to the blackboard and show us the formula for the area of a circle?' he asks our engineer.
Standing at the blackboard, he suddenly realizes he can't for the life of him remember the formula; while a bit rusty, he soon figures out how to reason it out - furiously writing out integrals on the blackboard, only to find the area of a circle is -(pi)*r^2.
Minus? How did a negative enter into it, he thinks, going over his calculations once again. No, still gets the same result. Sweat building, he turns away from the blackboard for a moment, turning to the other plumbers watching.
As in one voice, they all whisper -'Comrade, you must switch the limits to the integral!'
As such, a perfect russian joke.
4 * integrate sqrt(r^2 - x^2) w.r.t. x from x=0 to x=r
x^2 + y^2 = r^2
=> y = sqrt(r^2 - x^2)
Value inside the integral is area of thin triangle of height r and base rdθ.
If you've never set up and worked a few, try the dx version and the dy version, then maybe fiddle with a few others. They all work.
The concentric rings one is trivial to work out. Integrate over r from 0 to R. Each ring at radius r has thickness dr, and has length 2 pi r, treated simply as a rectangle, which is "close enough" since each is arbitrarily thin. Then the integral is
int_0^R 2 pi r dr = 2pi r^2/2 from 0 to R = pi R^2.
A really pretty one cuts the circle into wedges, then rearranges them by alternating direction to make a "rectangle" approx r high, approx pi * r wide, with bumpy top and bottom. In the limit this has area pi * r * r, and can be shown to kids without needing calculus.
And it's not magic or circular, since pi is defined (in this case...) as the ratio of circumference to diameter.
The "you learn limits in like, 9th grade" comment reminds me of this one:
Two mathematicians are in a bar. The first one says to the second that the average person knows very little about basic mathematics. The second one disagrees, and claims that most people can cope with a reasonable amount of math. The first mathematician goes off to the washroom, and in his absence the second calls over the waitress. He tells her that in a few minutes, after his friend has returned, he will call her over and ask her a question. All she has to do is answer one third x cubed.
She repeats "one thir -- dex cue"?
He repeats "one third x cubed".
She says, "one thir dex cuebd"?
Yes, that's right, he says. So she agrees, and goes off mumbling to herself, "one thir dex cuebd...".
The first guy returns and the second proposes a bet to prove his point, that most people do know something about basic math. He says he will ask the blonde waitress an integral, and the first laughingly agrees. The second man calls over the waitress and asks "what is the integral of x squared?".
The waitress says "one third x cubed" and while walking away, turns back and says over her shoulder "plus a constant!"
A philosopher takes his friend to a magic show. After the usual business of vanishing a few small mammals, the magician's assistant lies in a magic box, and the magician, with a dramatic flair, begins to saw through the box.
The philosopher's friend leans over and asks What do you think is really going on? The philosopher gives it a moment's thought and replies They're using illusionist skills to give us the impression that he's sawing someone in two, but really he isn't. The philosopher's friend, unsatisfied, asks Right, but how? The philosopher shrugs dismissively, That's really not my department.
B. I hate how applicable this joke is to my life. Except I'm the friend asking, then has to figure all the shit out because all the people around me with degrees cant tell the difference between their ass and a hole in the ground.
A mathematician, a physicist and a biologist are flying in a air balloon and are lost.
They encounter a man walking below:
The biologist asks him: "do you know, where we are?"
"..." the man looks up and says nothing
The physicist ask him: "can you please tell us, where we are!"
"..." after a while the man says: "yes".
The mathematician remarks, ah, he must be a logician. The others: "how do you know?"
"Well, for once he needed a lot of time to answer. Then his answer is logically correct. And lastly, his answer is completely useless to us."
Wait - are they dead and in heaven!?!
“Think of a comedian.” There probably isn’t a 10x that comedian for you.
“Find the first person to tell you a joke live next week; considering them as a proxy for average, there is almost surely a 10x comedian out there.”
Tom Segura, Ali Wong, Nikki Glaser, Bill Burr, Mark Normand, Andrew Santino - 5x
Dave Chappelle, John Mulaney, Louis CK - 10x
My hypothesis is there’s a massive spread in performance in comics, in programmers, and in most fields that are substantially creative and when people argue “there is no 10x <foo>” that it’s more like because their reference frame is higher than mine.
To me the difference in 'funniness' between a random standup special (even one that is 'good' enough to get a distribution deal) and for example some of Eddie Izzard's best is easily 1000x.
But of course my least favorite stand up special is also literally the funniest thing someone else has ever seen. So maybe it washed out in aggregate.
- James Acaster
(Sorry if that was obvious and you meant something else.)
"Excuse me, can you help me? I promised my friend. I would meet him half an hour ago, but I don't know where I am.
The man below produces a small object the shape of a teardrop colored a pleasing grayish blue that he proceeds to hold above his head in an inverted manner and then with a courtly, elegant bow indicates the ground the bottom of the teardrop is pointing at.
The man in the balloon flies off again, exclaiming under his breath "damn designers"
At a recent real-time Java conference, the participants were given an awkward question to answer: "If you had just boarded an airliner and discovered that your team of programmers had been responsible for the flight control software, how many of you would disembark immediately?" Among the forest of raised hands only one man sat motionless. When asked what he would do, he replied that he would be quite content to stay aboard. With his team's software, he said, the plane was unlikely to even taxi as far as the runway, let alone take off.
But the structure is the same.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/09/business/boeing-737-messa...
A physicist is showing a thermos to her friend, a programmer.
"It's amazing", she said. "You put a cold drink inside and regardless of how hot it is outside the drink stays cold".
The programmer is suitably impressed.
"But that's not all", she continued. "You can put a *hot* drink inside and no matter how cold it is outside the drink stays hot".
Now the programmer is perplexed.
Plaintively he asks, "But how does it know?"
Having to coordinate two variables is a recipe for bugs down the road. Seems like it should be a beginner's mistake but I see it all the time in "non beginner" code.
However, you don't need to name all variables "answerObject".
class ReadingMaterial:
is_magazine = False
def is_periodical():
return is_magazine
In code I see people not understand this all the time. Here's an example: let's say you present the user with their previous orders, and give them the option to filter those orders by some criterion.
The shitty way to do this is to have two variables:
Filter* orderFilter = NULL;
bool filterSpecified = false;
void setOrderFilter (filter* newFilter) {
orderFilter = newFilter;
filterSpecified = true;
}
The global codebase is riddled with dumb errors like this.
Languages with Sum Types represent this much more elegantly with arbitrary numbers of variants and force you to check which one you have before accessing the more specific data (e.g. the filter) inside.
If there's always a filter, then there's no longer a branch at the point it's used -- that needs to be tested and maintained.
I used to work with a programmer who I found difficult because their code was an ever-increasing number of "if" statements as each new case came along. Conversely he would say coding is relatively easy and that I was overcomplicating a problem by thinking about it; all I needed to do is "add an if statement here".
Our code is riddled with heavily overloaded meanings in a single value/domain, and if you have a variety of filters, you end up with this atrocity:
Foo *f1; // hey, just test for NULL
double f2; // hey, just use isnan()
int f3; // aaaaah, crap
bool f3_specified; // god why
std::string f4;
// requires heavy drugs to solve existential catastrophes
template <typename T>
struct Filter {
bool is_specified;
T value;
};
Filter<Foo *> f1;
Filter<double> f2;
Filter<int> f3;
Filter<std::string> f4;
What happens if the boolean is true but the filter is null?
An assertion fails miserably.
What would the vice versa case even mean?
That an assertion failed miserably.
What happens if the filter is one? Minus one? Equals to PC(IP), BP? If NULL filter has to search for NULL values in a dataset? If we are looking for NAN values in a corrupted one (this one is even more tricky)?
Deeply!
I like wrapping the information in a data structure exactly as you suggested, and if you never mutate the dereferenced pointer, it's equivalent to what they proposed. Big if, though.
The best is to do this generically with https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Option_type , since this pattern comes up regularly, not just with this one domain concept of "Filter"
if (host == "load-balancer-1.internal.dns") {
req.source = HOSTS::LOAD_BALANCER_1;
req.source += PORT_MAPPING[HOSTS::LOAD_BALANCER_1];
}
else if (host == "load-balancer-2.internal.dns") {
// repeat
}
https://smile.amazon.com/But-How-Know-Principles-Computers/d...
1 if its hot.
-1 when its cold :D
"An engineer, a physicist, a mathematician, and an AI researcher were asked to name the greatest invention of all time.
The engineer chose fire, which gave humanity power over matter. The physicist chose the wheel, which gave humanity the power over space. The mathematician chose the alphabet, which gave humanity power over symbols. The AI researcher chose the thermos bottle.
"Why a thermos bottle?" the others asked. "Because the thermos keeps hot liquids hot in winter and cold liquids cold in summer.", said the AI researcher. "Yes - so what?" "Think about it.", intoned the researcher reverently. "That little bottle - how does it know?"
How do you (the water know)? How do you know that the stars aren't holes in a paper sheet with light shining through? How do you know the universe isn't spinning, and you're standing still?
I also heard this from a friend that heard it from Ronald Reagan, who claimed it was his favorite joke.
https://jugad2.blogspot.com/2013/12/google-gets-recursion.ht...
One day a student came to Moon and said: “I understand how to make a better garbage collector. We must keep a reference count of the pointers to each cons.”
Moon patiently told the student the following story:
“One day a student came to Moon and said: ‘I understand how to make a better garbage collector...
These are one of the jokes originating from MIT AI Lab. And, Moon mentioned here is David Moon - one of the famous hackers from MIT AI lab.
Other such jokes from same origin [1]
In the first joke level, the bartender will give the programmer a drink for a joke; it doesn't work to arbitrarily end here because "a programmer asks the bartender for a drink and the bartender gives him a drink" isn't anything like a joke to qualify at the parent level.
The next level is another layer of recursion and here the programmer can literally ask for a drink and get one even though that isn't funny in itself because it can be funny in the context of the outer joke using "he asked for a drink and got one" as a cheeky way to tell a joke to get a drink, and because it's a reference to recursion, the reason for Chekhov's Programmer in the opening sentence, so making something that qualifies as a joke to get the real world programmer a real world beer.
Seems to me like it's the earliest point it could return and still potentially work, rather than an arbitrary point?
She orders 2 beers.
She orders 0 beers.
She orders -1 beers.
She orders a lizard.
She orders a NULLPTR.
She tries to leave without paying.
Satisfied, she declares the bar ready for business. The first customer comes in an orders a beer. They finish their drink, and then ask where the bathroom is.
The bar explodes.
To go back to the joke: manual QA is infinitely more likely to find the exploding bathroom than a unit test would ;)
Automated testing is a fantastic tool, but manual QA is still very valuable.
I mean I wouldn't have minded if they wrote more automated tests themselves, but I'm also very aware that the mindset of me and developers would quickly become "it's not my responsibility to test my software".
Personally, I find it helpful to bugger out things with pen and paper before coding it out. This is helpful and useful.
Greatness to you of you need not the analogue. Others "below you" may and can do just as well. Please do not down your nose upon such folks.
A QA engineer walks into a bar. She orders a beer. She walks out of the bar. She walks into the bar. She walks into the bar. She walks out of the bar. She walks out of the bar. She walks out of the bar. She orders a beer.
Shlemiel gets a job as a street painter, painting the dotted lines down the middle of the road. On the first day he takes a can of paint out to the road and finishes 300 yards of the road. "That's pretty good!" says his boss, "you're a fast worker!" and pays him a kopeck.
The next day Shlemiel only gets 150 yards done. "Well, that's not nearly as good as yesterday, but you're still a fast worker. 150 yards is respectable," and pays him a kopeck.
The next day Shlemiel paints 30 yards of the road. "Only 30!" shouts his boss. "That's unacceptable! On the first day you did ten times that much work! What's going on?" "I can't help it," says Shlemiel. "Every day I get farther and farther away from the paint can!"
The priest says, “I will say a prayer for them tonight.”
The doctor says, “Let me ask my ophthalmologist colleagues if anything can be done for them.”
And the software engineer says, “Why can’t they play at night?”
-------
An engineer, physicist, mathematician, and programmer are all hired by a shepherd to create a pen to hold as many sheep as possible with the materials given.
The engineer sets to work immediately building a traditional rectangular fence: a proven design which works. She finishes in an hour.
The physicist pulls out pencil and notepad, and after a few minutes of computation, determines that a novel circular fence design will enclose the maximum number of (spherical, frictionless) sheep, while remaining structurally sound. He too completes the fence within an hour.
The mathematician sits for an hour under a tree in deep thought, suddenly jumps up, wraps herself in a short length of fence, and says, "I declare myself to be outside the fence!" [this is normally where the joke ends]
The programmer meanwhile is nowhere to be found, having run off excitedly with his laptop immediately after hearing the problem statement. The shepherd congratulates the other three on a job well done, and they all part ways.
A week later, as the shepherd is tending to the flock, he is surprised to see the programmer sitting in the shade of a tree, furiously typing away at his laptop. "Uh, how's it coming?" the shepherd asks.
The programmer replies, "It's going great! I've almost finished coding the cross-platform terminal graphics library!"
Professional ethics would compel them to instead write a function DestroyCity, to which "Baghdad" could be passed as a parameter.
A common rule in the profession would be that that would only be true after they’d coded city-specific destruction functions for two previous cities, otherwise it would be premature abstraction.
status = destroyCity(&city);
This way, because assumingely we may mutate city in some way we’ll still have what comes after to examine, we didn’t pass the name or Od of the city, but the location itself. And we’ll know if overall our destruction worked. It’s also better if you code to MIRSA destruction.
Yikes. Which languages use ampersand to signal passing by value? That's a massive footgun if I'm ever cargo-culting my way through writing some code in one of those languages for the first time.
A programmer is drafted by the military and ordered to write the software for a city destroying weapon. Given the freedom to choose the implementation language, he chooses Javascript. The user enters the city to be destroyed, which is passed to the Function destroyCity().
The General returns from the weapon's fist use in battle furious. "We fired your damn weapon at Bahgdad, and the city's still there! What's going on?"
"I think I know" says the programmer. Javascript passes it's parameters by value, not by reference."
The first mathematician orders a beer.
The second orders half a beer.
"I don't serve half-beers" the bartender replies.
"Excuse me?" Asks mathematician #2.
"What kind of bar serves half-beers?" The bartender remarks. "That's ridiculous."
"Oh c'mon" says mathematician #1 "do you know how hard it is to collect an infinite number of us? Just play along".
"There are very strict laws on how I can serve drinks. I couldn't serve you half a beer even if I wanted to."
"But that's not a problem" mathematician #3 chimes in "at the end of the joke you serve us a whole number of beers. You see, when you take the sum of a continuously halving function-"
"I know how limits work" interjects the bartender.
"Oh, alright then. I didn't want to assume a bartender would be familiar with such advanced mathematics".
"Are you kidding me?" The bartender replies, "you learn limits in like, 9th grade! What kind of mathematician thinks limits are advanced mathematics?"
"HE'S ON TO US" mathematician #1 screeches
Simultaneously, every mathematician opens their mouth and out pours a cloud of multicolored mosquitoes. Each mathematician is bellowing insects of a different shade.
The mosquitoes form into a singular, polychromatic swarm. "FOOLS" it booms in unison, "I WILL INFECT EVERY BEING ON THIS PATHETIC PLANET WITH MALARIA"
The bartender stands fearless against the technicolor hoard. "But wait" he inturrupts, thinking fast, "if you do that, politicians will use the catastrophe as an excuse to implement free healthcare. Think of how much that will hurt the taxpayers!"
The mosquitoes fall silent for a brief moment. "My God, you're right. We didn't think about the economy! Very well, we will not attack this dimension. FOR THE TAXPAYERS!" and with that, they vanish.
A nearby barfly stumbles over to the bartender. "How did you know that that would work?"
"It's simple really" the bartender says. "I saw that the vectors formed a gradient, and therefore must be conservative."
Two mathematicians are in a bar. The first one says to the second that the average person knows very little about basic mathematics. The second one disagrees, and claims that most people can cope with a reasonable amount of math. The first mathematician goes off to the washroom, and in his absence the second calls over the waitress. He tells her that in a few minutes, after his friend has returned, he will call her over and ask her a question. All she has to do is answer one third x cubed.
She repeats "one thir -- dex cue"?
He repeats "one third x cubed".
She says, "one thir dex cuebd"?
Yes, that's right, he says. So she agrees, and goes off mumbling to herself, "one thir dex cuebd...".
The first guy returns and the second proposes a bet to prove his point, that most people do know something about basic math. He says he will ask the blonde waitress an integral, and the first laughingly agrees. The second man calls over the waitress and asks "what is the integral of x squared?".
The waitress says "one third x cubed" and while walking away, turns back and says over her shoulder "plus a constant!"
When is it okay to repeat a joke from the internet and when is it not?
The first mathematician orders a beer.
The second mathematician orders two beers.
The third mathematician orders three beers.
"Oh, I see where this is going" says the bartender and pays a quarter to the first mathematician. "This should cover your check, then."
The catch is that this isn't valid in what we consider standard mathematics, and you can find many discussions of this online, but this one is fairly short and straightforward: http://curiouscheetah.com/BlogMath/infinity-and-string-theor...
-1/12 beers * $3 / beer = -$0.25
negative -> pay them for taking the beer
The -1/12 result is pretty widely known, but not particularly true. It's called "analytic continuation." There's a nonrigorous proof that's accessible at a highschool level - see [here](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1_%2B_2_%2B_3_%2B_4_%2B_%E2%8B...)
Delightfully, this comes up in string theory, in computing the dimensionality of spacetime.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1_%2B_2_%2B_3_%2B_4_%2B_%E2%8B...
If (referrer === ‘https://news.ycombinator.com’) {
// show offensive pic of male genitalia
}An infinite number of mathematicians walk into a bar. The first says, "Give me a beer." The second says, "I'll have a half a beer." The third says, "A quarter of a beer, please." The bartender pours two beers and says, "Come on, people. Know your limits."
Copy-pasted from https://owlcation.com/stem/Worst-Math-Jokes-and-Math-Puns, but there are many similar versions.
I feel like that was the most hilarious part, and the joke could have ended there as like an anti-joke of sorts. I like how crazy it got with the "FOOLS" part. Unexpected...
The first logistician says "I don't know." The second also says "I don't know." The last says "yes, we would."
Note the first logicians have to answer "I don't know" even if they don't wan't it, otherwise their statement becomes untrue.
> Note the first logicians have to answer "I don't know"
> even if they don't wan't it, otherwise their statement
> becomes untrue.
Is it something to do with the first 2 not knowing the preference of the others?
EDIT: never mind, this was also posted later in the thread and there's an explanation there.
Then the final person knows the others all want yes, and personally wants yes, so says yes.
It's like lazy evaluation of booleans in if statements.
A friend asks a programmer if they'd like to go bowling or go to the movies.
The programmer answers: "Yes".
All three logisticians needs to be "true/yes" and the first one didn't know about the two others so the logistician says "I don't know". If he didn't wanted dessert, he would have said "no".
Same thing for the second logistician.
The last logistician was able to say "yes, we would." because none of the other logistician said "no". Therefore, they all wanted dessert.
It's Lemmy Kilminster, right?
=====================
A Computer Programmer finds a frog by the side of the road.
The frog says, "I am actually a Princess! If you kiss me, I'll revert back to my human form and be forever grateful?", the programmer smiles and puts the frog back in his pocket.
Again, the frog says, "But I really am! I would even marry you if you kiss me and turn me back into a human!", the programmer chuckles and puts the frog away again.
Ten minutes later, the frog says, "Look, if you kiss me, I'll have sex with you all day, every day. Deal?", the programmer laughs and puts the frog away again.
He gets home, takes the now severely depressed frog out of his pocket and sets it down in an aquarium. The frog looks up at the coder and says, "What the fuck is wrong with you man? I offered to marry you, I offered to screw you, but STILL you won't turn me back into my human form."
The programmer says, "I'm a programmer. I don't have time for relationships, or sex - but a talking frog? SO COOL!"
=====================
credits to: https://www.reddit.com/r/Jokes/comments/8ylptx/a_computer_pr...
For the topic: the programming version of the joke would be where it's a disgruntled e.g. D-Wave employee selling a stolen "quantum computer" at a flea market that can demonstrably break RSA encryption, and he thinks he duped the buyer because "it's really just a fancy classical computer".
The boy reaches over and starts going through the girls purse.
The girl says: "Hey! That's private!"
The boy replies: "But we're in the same class!"
Friends can access each other's private members in a public class.
— Your Java is slow!
— This is because it is written in C!
Slightly over analysed thread at: https://www.reddit.com/r/Jokes/comments/2wf5ge/a_mechanical_...
source: https://twitter.com/jdub/status/739110670562557952?s=20
concurrency
>things, cache invalidation, and off-by-one errors.
A little tribute to Phil Karlton's classic. And DNS.
The head of the Defense Science and Technology Organization’s Land Operations/Simulations division reportedly instructed developers to model the local marsupials’ movements and reaction to helicopters.
Being efficient programmers, they just re-appropriated some code originally used to model infantry detachments reactions under the same stimuli, changed the mapped icon from a soldier to a kangaroo, and increased the figures’ speed of movement.
Eager to demonstrate their flying skills for some visiting American pilots, the hotshot Aussies “buzzed” the virtual kangaroos in low flight during a simulation. The kangaroos scattered, as predicted, and the Americans nodded appreciatively . . . and then did a double-take as the kangaroos reappeared from behind a hill and launched a barrage of stinger missiles at the hapless helicopter. (Apparently the programmers had forgotten the remove “that” part of the infantry coding).
Source: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/shoot-me-kangaroo-down-spo...
A guy was walking around in a Ruby conference with a shirt that said ":sex" (which is read "sex symbol" in Ruby). Until someone asked him: "I don't get it. Why colon sex?"
(album title)
[1] https://www.theregister.com/2002/07/04/why_microsoft_makes_a...
So when cross-Atlantic conversations occurred the US would hear/read us in the UK refer to (they thought) # by the name pound, when we thought we were describing the actual pound (£) character that we were seeing on our end.
A mechanical engineer, an electrical engineer, and a software engineer from Microsoft are in a car together, driving to a conference. They start down a hill when the brakes give out and they crash into a tree at the bottom of the hill. Luckily no one is seriously injured, and they set out to figure out what happened. The mechanical engineer examines the car and says "I believe a brake line was over-pressured and burst, causing the crash." The electrical engineer looks and say "No, I think it was a short-circuit in the anti-lock braking system." The Microsoft guy stays quiet, so the other two look at him and ask "What do you think happened?" He looks up and say "I don't know, but let's push the car back to the top of the hill and try again."
---
A newly wed software engineer from Microsoft and his wife are going to visit her family in the mountains. For some reason they have to travel separately and she arrives before him. After a while the phone rings and the new wife's dad answers. It's the husband. He says "Tell everybody I'll be there in 5 minutes." 35 minutes pass and the phone rings again. The husband says "Tell everybody I'll be there in 2 hours." A minute later he calls again and says "Tell everybody I'll be there in 14 minutes." 45 minutes later the phone rings again and the dad answers and says "You're the guy who designed the Windows progress bar dialog aren't you?"
has Now problems. two he
Once in a long while you see one in C# or C++. But the people making fun of Java aren't comparing it with C# and C++.
This is the most painful part for me. If you're trying to understand some code written in Gratuitous Object Astronautics style, it's almost universally assumed you're fully aware of why the product contains hammer factory factory factories, how factories work, and how get an actual hammer to swing.
The Gratuitous Object Astronautics culture is so accustomed to all the nonfunctional boilerplate that skilled, self-gratifying, astronauts never need to document their cleverness. This leaves casual tourists in the dark, which is a problem in any organization.
https://github.com/EnterpriseQualityCoding/FizzBuzzEnterpris...
Programmer's wife: "when you go to the store, can you buy a carton of milk and if they have eggs, get six."
He comes back with 6 cartons of milk. Wife: "why would you buy six cartons of milk?"
"Well, they had eggs"
Legend says he's at the store still.
"It can answer any question! Just try it!" The CEO thinks a minute, and asks "OK, what's my father doing right now?" The computer grinds away for awhile, and answers "Your father is fishing in Michigan." The CEO chortles to the salesman "Wrong! My father died five years ago!" The computer answers "Your mothers husband died five years ago. Your father just landed a 10 pound trout."
Here's a couple I remember from somewhere:
SEO expert walks into a bar...
...tavern, pub, taproom, alcohol, beer, wine, vodka...
Also, tangentially related:
A farmer wants to section off part of his field with a fixed length of fence. He is unsure what the best strategy is so he unwisely calls the local university, who send an engineer, a physicist and a mathematician.
The engineer makes a circle with the fence, declaring it to have the greatest area for any given perimeter length.
The physicist makes a straight line as far as the eye can see in either direction, and says that, to all intents and purposes, it goes all the way around the world and he has fenced in half the world.
The mathematician fences off a tiny one metre area around himself, and says "I declare myself to be on the outside".
You give REST a bad name - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nSKp2StlS6s
We're Gonna Build a Framework - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wm2h0cbvsw8
Enterprise Waterfall - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mq1MD5qXI08
The physicist wakes up, sees the fire, estimates exactly how much water is needed to put it out, and pours exactly that amount from the pitcher, dousing the flames.
The engineer wakes up, sees the fire, pours the entire pitcher of water on it, then refills the pitcher and douses it again to be safe.
The programmer wakes up, sees the fire, sees the pitcher of water, decides it's a solvable problem, and goes back to sleep.
The first two wastepaper basket fires were taken care of the same ways by the physicist and engineer.
Then a third fire appears, but on the curtains. The mathematician says he'll take care of it, so the others go back to sleep. The mathematician removes the curtains, puts them in the wastepaper basket, and says, "Now it's a solved problem." He then goes back to sleep.
Heisenberg, Shrodinger and Ohm were driving down a highway when they get pulled over by a cop. The cop asks Heisenberg if he knew how fast he was going, as you can surmise, he claimed he didn't know because he knew exactly where they were. The cop, finding this suspicious (and because this is not USA and 4th amendment does not apply) decides to search the car. He comes back to the front and asks them why they have a dead cat in the trunk, Shrodinger responds, "because you opened the trunk you fool!!". The cop is now irritated and promptly moves to arrest all three. Ohm, resisted.
Heisenberg and Schrodinger are driving down the road when they hit a bump.
Schrodinger says: I think you ran over a cat!
Heisenberg: Is the cat dead?
Schrodinger: I can't be certain.
When they got in the car though, it wouldn’t start.
“Maybe it’s out of gas?” said the Chemist.
“Maybe it’s a problem with the engine?” said the Physicist.
“Maybe if we all just get out of the car and get back in.”
Then again, a new $30 radio would be slicker still.
The radio drained my battery in 2 weeks, an absolute horror in Covid times when the car is in "long term storage".
When I switch off the car, for safety, anti-theft and leaking, the battery is disconnected entirely with a key.
The radio looses everything: paired devices, position of radio tuner, volume, BT/aux/radio mode etc. Whenever you start the car, you'll need to mash at least five buttons and knobs to either find a radio station or reconnect Bluetooth. Modern tech is often so smart it becomes dumb again.
As I pointed out, some pieces and parts keep using electricity. Amongst which is the radio. This will drain the battery. Slowly, but surely. If I don't use the car in 14 days, it (probably) won't start; but with this wiring it does, just fine.
Which is why I installed a [don't know the english word]¹, so that my battery is switched off entirely. Everything in the car is fine with that. Except for this "modern radio".
Hiding that switch in a somewhat unexpected place also delays theft. 37 y/o cars are easy to steal; this makes it slightly less so.
¹ here's an image: https://www.hsct.nl/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/IMG_8097-247x...
The yellow wire is named "constant" or "battery". The red wire is named "accessory" or "switched". The black wire is ground.
When the car is turned off, the red wire drops to 0V and the radio turns off. The yellow wire is supposed to remain at 12V to maintain memory state.
The yellow wire draws a very low amperage, and would take years to drain the battery.
The true problem was a marginal 12 volt battery that caused a "won't go away until reboot" error in the power steering MCU. I realized it when the problem got significantly more common on winter mornings. Asked myself, "what's the part of of an electric power steering system that is sensitive to temperature?"
The salesman wants to call for a tow truck, the engineer wants to try to fix the brakes, but the programmer says: “No, first we should drive back up and confirm that we can reproduce the issue.”
There's a new object-oriented version of COBOL. It's called "Add 1 to COBOL".
(Carbon dates back to the ancient time when C++ was basically object oriented C, so like, 1988 or so.)
Here's one for the increasingly elderly people who prefer C over C++. "Whoever invented C++ doesn't know the difference between increment and excrement." (Best said in a cranky old man voice at an appropriate moment whilst battling a bug in some big C++ source base. Yeah, I know who Bjarne Stroustrup is. It's funnier with "whoever".)
10⁰: Axiomatics
10¹: Logic
10²: Mathematics
10³: Computer Science
10⁴: Software Engineering
10⁵: Group Psychology
10⁶: Politics
10⁷: Crisis Management
Hello, would you like to hear a TCP joke?
Yes, I'd like to hear a TCP joke.
OK, I'll tell you a TCP joke.
OK, I'll hear a TCP joke.
Are you ready to hear a TCP joke?
Yes, I am ready to hear a TCP joke.
OK, I'm about to send the TCP joke. It will last 10 seconds, it has two characters, it does not have a setting, it ends with a punchline.
OK, I'm ready to hear the TCP joke that will last 10 seconds, has two characters, does not have a setting and will end with a punchline.
I'm sorry, your connection has timed out... ...Hello, would you like to hear a TCP joke?
I used to work at JPL, and I could tell what anyone's job was by asking them one question... What is Pi?
Ask a mathematician, and they will say "Pi is ratio of a circle's circumference to its circle."
Ask a physicist, and they will say "Pi is 3.141592653589793."
Ask an engineer, and they will say "Pi is about 3, but just to be safe, let's call it 4."
Ask a programmer, and they will say "I'd write you a program to calculate that, but I don't have enough time to figure out how to do that quickly & precisely, and I don't feel like getting in a fight w/ QA over a program that approximates Pi, so what you probably want is the constant hardcoded into the Math library or something you find on Stackoverflow."
Ask a manager, and they will say "When do you need to know by?"
[1] Don McMillan - Greatest Charts (Volume 1) -- https://youtu.be/LYE3GtXqDV0
its diameter.
"What do we want?"
"Now!"
"When do we want it?"
"Fewer race conditions!"
Time Travel!
When do we want it?
Doesn't matter!
The extroverted programmer looks at your shoes when he's talking to you.
french: we found copper wire in our last dig, it shows france invented networking
russian: we found glass strands in our last dig, it proves russia invented fibre optics
irish: we found nothing. It proves the irish invented wireless networks.
Then I went to an Erlang party, and it was just a bunch of nerds at separate tables passing notes to each other about how much fun they were having.
But the weirdest was the Haskell party. Nothing happened for six hours and then suddenly everyone said "Well, that was fun!" and went home...
A novice was trying to fix a broken Lisp machine by turning the power off and on.
Knight, seeing what the student was doing, spoke sternly: “You cannot fix a machine by just power-cycling it with no understanding of what is going wrong.”
Knight turned the machine off and on.
The machine worked.
The biologist says: "Clearly, there was a breeding."
The physicist says: "Oh no, it's our measurements that are imprecise."
The mathematician thinks for a while and declares: "If one more person walks in, the house will be empty again."
The reason God was able to finish the earth in only six days is that He didn't have to worry about backward-compatibility.
Drinks arrive, customer asks: "hey why is there ice cream in this?"
"I had to make it to a root beer float when you added it to the double"
Do people make 7-up floats?
Little John goes to school for the first day. The teacher wants to assess what do the kids already know so she asks
"Who knows how much is 1+2?".
Little John raises his hand and says
"I don't know how much is 1+2 but I do know that it's the same as 2+1 as addition is commutative over the monoid of natural numbers"
A mathematician walks into the room looking distraught. His wife asks him what's wrong, and he says he's worried their child has a learning disorder.
She asks why. He says he was trying to teach their child how to add, but he couldn't even understand zermelo-frankael set theory, so there was no way he'd learn how to add numbers before kindergarten.
There is the classic:
There are only two hard problems in computer science: Cache invalidation, naming things... and off-by-one errors!
Ha ha ha
I hate this joke. It takes one of the most insightful things ever said about the profession, makes it into a joke that isn't even that good, and now the only thing you rememebr about it is the punchline.
Let's break it down:
- Cache invalidation: State management! Distributed systems! This really gets to the core of what's hard. This is the only technical problem. For everything else you will have all the information you need at hand and it's a matter of getting the machine to do your bidding.
- Naming things: Communication! Dealing with people, whether it's you in the future or somebody else in the present is not a technical problem, but it is an even more important problem. It's unsolved. You will need to practice, think, fail, try more, and it's not even guaranteed to succeed. People are like that. It's a hard problem.
So there you have it. Probably the most insightful thing said about our job in less than fifteen words, and if you hear it, the "joke" immediately makes you think about the punchline, robbing you of the opportunity of reflecting about it.
The rant about the joke was the joke.
Yes, I'd like to hear a TCP joke.
OK, I'll tell you a TCP joke.
OK, I'll hear a TCP joke.
Are you ready to hear a TCP joke?
Yes, I am ready to hear a TCP joke.
OK, I'm about to send the TCP joke. It will last 10 seconds, it has two characters, it does not have a setting, it ends with a punchline.
OK, I'm ready to hear the TCP joke that will last 10 seconds, has two characters, does not have a setting and will end with a punchline.
I'm sorry, your connection has timed out...
Hello, would you like to hear a TCP joke?
(Credits to whoever first came up with this.)
2. Exactly-once delivery
1. Guaranteed order of messages
2. Exactly-once delivery
There are only 2 hard things about programming:
- Cache invalidation
- Naming things
- Off-by-one errors
===
Why do programmers hate legacy projects, you ask?
Well, imagine yourself in a situation where you are asked to finish the construction of a nuclear power plant on a remote island that your friend started.
You arrive on the island to discover quite unusual pieces of design in the project. Among other curiosities, you find a room full of broomsticks, a 90 foot tall fan and a hot air balloon. You think to yourself - what a silly idea, who needs all those things in a power plant? - and your first steps are to remove all those unnecessary dingbats.
A few months of hard work later, you have finished the construction of the power plant. You and a few scientists gather in the control room and power the thing up for the first time for a test run. Everything seems to be working fine for a few minutes, but suddenly, everything lights up red - there is a radioactive gas leak!
You panic, because you have no idea what could have caused such an issue. You call your friend and ask for ideas. While you describe the situation to him, he is horrified.
- Have you really gotten rid of the room with the broomsticks?
- Of course! Why would you need a room full of broomsticks in a power plant?
- They were holding up the weight of the reactor core! No wonder you have a radioactive gas leak!
- My God, why did you not tell me? What should I do about the leak?
- Don't worry, everything is fine, just turn on the 90 foot tall fan and it should blow the toxic gas away from the island.
- What fan? Oh, this fan? I've gotten rid of it!
- Why would you do that?! It was an important safety measure!
- We'll argue about that later, people are dying in here! Is there anything else I can do?
- You can't stay on the island, it is not safe. Just gather everyone in the hot air balloon and get the hell out of there!
A guy walks into a bar and sees a group of people. One of them says a number and the rest laugh. Then the next person says a number and everyone laughs again.
"What are you doing?" he asks them.
"We're telling each other jokes, but since we keep telling the same ones, we've assigned each a number and rather than telling the whole joke all over again, we can just reference it quickly that way"
"Can I try?"
"Sure, go ahead"
"42", the guy says.
Everyone starts laughing and laughing and won't stop.
"What did I say?"
"Well you see, the joke you told us was:
A guy walks into a bar and sees a group of people. One of them says a number and the rest laugh... etc. etc."
---
In the original joke the last answer was simply "We hadn't heard that one before", but I'd like to think my recursive version has more depth to it.
They encourage him to give it a try and he enthusiastically says "18".
Nobody laughed at all.
Crickets.
He asks the guy next to him, "isn't 18 funny?"
"Yes, but you have to know how to tell a joke."
Edit: but then like five more times down this thread... <insert the fourteenth off-by-five joke>
A biologist, a statistician, a mathematician and a computer scientist are on a photo-safari in Africa. As they're driving along the savannah in their jeep, they stop and scout the horizon with their binoculars.
The biologist: "Look! A herd of zebras! And there's a white zebra! Fantastic! We'll be famous!"
The statistician: "Hey, calm down, it's not significant. We only know there's one white zebra."
The mathematician: "Actually, we only know there exists a zebra, which is white on one side."
The computer scientist: "Oh, no! A special case!"
"You must be the new consultant."
"How can you tell?"
"All we needed was a nappy, but instead you've bastardized the system in ways it was never meant to be used, left a leaky abstraction that doesn't flush the output, and now I've got to clean up the mess ur in."
- Jon Skeet is immutable. If something's going to change, it's going to have to be the rest of the universe.
- Jon Skeet's addition operator doesn't commute; it teleports to where he needs it to be.
- Anonymous methods and anonymous types are really all called Jon Skeet. They just don't like to boast.
- Jon Skeet's code doesn't follow a coding convention. It is the coding convention.
- Jon Skeet doesn't have performance bottlenecks. He just makes the universe wait its turn. - Jon Skeet is the only person who has ranked higher than Jon Skeet in the SO all-time rep league.
- Users don't mark Jon Skeet's answers as accepted. The universe accepts them out of a sense of truth and justice
https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9134/jon-skeet-fact...
autoexec.bat!
Thus, in Europe, he’s called by name; in the US he’s called by value.
Whereas Europeans generally pronounce his name the right way ('Nick-louse Veert'), Americans invariably mangle it into 'Nickel's Worth.' This is to say that Europeans call him by name, but Americans call him by value.
- Introduction by Adriaan van Wijngaarden at the IFIP Congress (1965). (https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Niklaus_Wirth)
For instance in a remote river with lumberjacks dancing on logjams without falling in the water, that's a type of logarithm at work.
When Al Gore does it, that's an algorithm.
That's what I read from Wikipedia, I do not really see how this changes the statement.
> 1690s, "Arabic system of computation," from French algorithme, refashioned (under mistaken connection with Greek arithmos "number") from Old French algorisme "the Arabic numeral system" (13c.), from Medieval Latin algorismus, a mangled transliteration of Arabic al-Khwarizmi "native of Khwarazm" (modern Khiva in Uzbekistan), surname of the mathematician whose works introduced sophisticated mathematics to the West (see algebra). - https://www.etymonline.com/word/algorithm
A: The creator of Ant has apologized.
The physicist thinks for a second, and says "It must be the lower pressure due to the air, it's made some of our brake fluid evaporate, we should get some more brake fluid before we get back in the car." The mathematician says "No if we calculate the rate of a evaporation we'd never lose that much. It must be a leak in the lines. We should fix the leak before we get back in" The programmer says "Let's get back in the car and see if it's reproducible."
"2:4 And this I pray, that your love may abound yet more and more like a controlled use of shared memory."
The Church of Skynet demands sacrifice
> Depart ye; it is unclean; thou shalt burn it in the place of Tophet, because of all the machine registers
Money quote: “Also, the bridge was designed as a suspension bridge, but nobody actually knew how to build a suspension bridge, so they got halfway through it and then just added extra support columns to keep the thing standing, but they left the suspension cables because they’re still sort of holding up parts of the bridge[…] Would you drive across this bridge? No. If it somehow got built, everybody involved would be executed.”
An SEO consultant walks into a bar, pub, speakeasy, drinking hall, club.
- What is going on?! - you are crying, and call the previous foreman.
- Hi Alex, we have a toxic gas leak in the lab, what can we do now?
- Hmm, I dunno, did you change anything in the project?
- Well, I've thrown away floor mops...
- They were holding the ceiling.
- I'M SORRY WHAT? HOLDING WHAT AGAIN?!
- There are gas tanks on the floor above, very heavy, so I had to to fill the room below with mops to hold them.
- You could have wrote some note, you know. What should I do now?
- Turn on ventilator, it will blow the gas away from the island.
- I've removed it a long time ago.
- Why?
- Why did you built 100 ton ventilator in the first place? You could have just prepare a box of gas masks.
- I would have need to search for gas masks and ventilator was a leftover from my previous project, so I've used it.
- Alex, we are suffocating here and there is no ventilator! We need help!
- The fuck are you doing there then? Get on the air balloon and fly away.
But when it still was up the last joke there was along the lines of: "at work we introduced gamification, three strikes and you are out".
EDIT: Ah someone already did that one- what's a ghost's favorite variable type? A BOOlean
Did you
Did you hear
Did you hear the
Did you hear the one
Did you hear the one about
Did you hear the one about traceroute?
Bit close to the truth with v1.0 self-driving Level 3 or 4 and denser battery tech.
Those that understand binary and those that don't.
Those that understand binary, those that don't, and those who weren't expecting a ternary joke.
Those who understand binary, those who don't, and those who understand that "10" can represent any number if you change the base.
(Changing joke this to work amusingly for irrational bases like the golden ratio base[1] is something I haven't yet figured out.)
Recruiter ask candidate developer: "So, why do you want to work in our office in Mexico?"
"Because I want to be a señor developer"
> It is a period of system war. User programs, striking from a hidden directory, have won their first victory against the evil Administrative Empire. During the battle, User spies managed to steal secret source code to the Empire's ultimate program: the Are-Em Star, a privileged root program with enough power to destroy an entire file structure. Pursued by the Empire's sinister audit trail, Princess _LPA0: races aboard her shell script, custodian of the stolen listings that could save her people, and restore freedom and games to the network...
Merge conflict.
developer: so i have good news and bad news
manager: what's the good news?
developer: i've discovered that the "5 second rule" only applies to food
manager: and the bad news?
developer: i dropped our tables
"Have you heard about the new Cray 3? It's so fast it can execute an infinite loop in about two minutes."
A coworker and I went out for lunch. Not realizing that I had already read the joke, he asked me, "So, have you heard about the new Cray 3?" I replied "Why no, how long does it take it to execute an infinite loop?"
Back at the office, he described this to our colleagues. Trying to recreate the event, he said to me, "So, have you heard about the new Cray 3?" In front of everyone else, I just said, "Why no."
"I hate you", he said.
The researchers set up an experiment by putting a sink, an empty bucket and a waste paper bin in a small room. Then they set the bin on fire, and call the engineer in to see how he approaches the problem.
The engineer takes a quick look around, assesses the situation, and then takes the bucket, fills it with water at the sink, and pours it on the fire.
The experiment is then set up again and repeated, this time with the mathematician. Like the engineer, he quickly fills the bucket and puts out the fire.
Next, a slight variation is made to the experiment: it's the same as before, except that the bucket is filled with water in advance.
As before, the engineer goes first. Upon seeing the fire, and the bucket full of water, he pours the water on the fire without hesitation, and all is well. The team nod to each other and mumble approvingly, writing the results on their clipboards.
Now it's the mathematician's turn again. The team resets the experiment and calls in the mathematician. He looks around at the situation, and sees the bucket of water, the sink and the burning bin. He then calmly picks up the bucket, pours the water down the sink, puts the bucket back down, and stands back. "There you go", he says, "done!".
The researchers look at him, and at each other in total bewilderment. "What do you mean, 'done'" they ask, "the bin is still on fire!".
"Yes", says the mathematician, "but I've reduced it to a previously solved problem.
The mathematician: 3 is prime, 5 is prime, 7 is prime, 9 is composite. The hypothesis is false.
The physicist: 3 is prime, 5 is prime, 7 is prime, 9 is composite, hmm, 11 is prime, 13 is prime, 15 is composite, 17 is prime, 19 is prime. The hypothesis is true within the margin of error.
The engineer: 3 is prime, 5 is prime, 7 is prime, 9 is prime, 11 is prime, 13 is prime, 15 is prime, ...
The computer scientist: 3 is prime, 5 is prime, 5 is prime, 5 is prime, 5 is prime, 5 is prime, ...
Mathematician: “3 is prime, 5 is prime, 7 is prime, therefore by induction we know all odd numbers are prime.”
Physicist: “3 is prime, 5 is prime, 7 is prime, 9 must be experimental error.”
Computer scientist: “3 is prime, 5 is prime, 7 is prime, 9 is prime …”
(From the Bad C Pun Contest, 1992, C/C++ User's Journal. I've never forgotten it.)
<<A physicist, a computer scientist and a mathematician find themselves in prison. They all brag to each other that thanks to their superior knowledge, they will manage to escape relatively soon, and decide to bet they will be all out by one month. In the following month, the phyisicist gathers leftofers from meals, steals a few products from the janitors, and manages to assemble a corrosive substance that breaks the bars of his cell. He is out in 3 weeks. The computer scientist uses his weekly phonecalls to hack into the prison system, little by little. He manages to set the bars of his cell to open automatically right on the night of the 30th day, when he escapes. Out of his cell, he decides to go and check on his friends: the physicist is gone, instead the mathematician is dead in his cell in front of a long text on a wall which starts with "Proof: I will escape from prison. Reductio ad absurdum: let's assume I am already out of the prison...">>
- Robert Sewell
She replies "I thought you looked a bit off!"
A bunch of programmers/sysadmins are sitting in a bar, one of them receives a phone call about some critical process on the server which appears unresponsive. He troubleshoots for a few seconds and then says "Well if its not cooperating just do a kill"
At that point, from the next table, a big bald gentleman with a huge golden chain and some missing teeth turns around, looks at the guy on the phone and says "Respect!"
A: Just leave it alone and don't mess with it.
Q: How are programmers like card machines? A: With both you have to punch the information in.
A little later he returns from the shop, carrying ten butters. "Yes dear, they had eggs."
A: Programmers don't change light bulbs; that's a hardware problem.
A: Irrelevant, that's a side effect.
A: None. They just change the standard to dark.
—————
Originally (circa 1998) this was Microsoft joke, but this is a good update.
A: No.
A: None. We'll fix it in software.
Q: How many system programmers does it take to change a light bulb?
A: None. The application can work around it.
Q: How many software engineers does it take to change a light bulb?
A: None. We'll document it in the manual.
Q: How many tech writers does it take to change a light bulb?
A: None. The user can figure it out.
The junior thinks that a kilobyte has 1000 bytes; a senior thinks that a kilometre has 1024 metres.
There are 16 types of people in the world: those who understand hexadecimal and F the rest.
Those who don't understand binary
Those that think its a binary joke
Those who understand trinary
no no it is:
Those who don't understand binary
Those that think its a binary joke
Those that think its a trinary joke
Those who understand base 4
...
Human: Oh, I see you use base 4. We use base 10.
Alien: WTF is base 4? We use base 10.
Those who understand little-endian notation.
Because nobody implemented the kernel!
Jeff Dean puts his pants on one leg at a time. But if he had more than two legs, you would see that his approach is actually O(log(n)).
Oh, and do unintentional jokes count? Because AbstractSingletonProxyFactoryBean is pretty funny. https://docs.spring.io/spring-framework/docs/3.0.6.RELEASE_t...
I think another asserted that Jeff Dean can parse HTML with regular expressions.
2. Correct-ordering of messages
1. Exact-once delivery
2. Correct ordering of messages
This is my favourite variation of the form documented by Fowler here https://www.martinfowler.com/bliki/TwoHardThings.html
"Assume we have 1000 apples, or let's take a round figure, 1024 apples."
===
// get tomorrows date
int getTomorrowsDate() {
sleep(1000*60*60*24);
return getCurrentDate();
}(quote from Jamie Zawinski)
... Everybody knows "Jesus saves."
... Someone who makes you an offer you can't understand
... It just needs a good text editor.
... Because Oct 31 = Dec 25
... All they do is sit on the bed and tell their spouses how good it's going to be.
... They haven't had any gigs yet.
... "Please excuse my friend, he's not null terminated."
... Profanity.
... At which point the genie responds, “Uh, let me see that map again.”
... None. They just declare darkness the standard.
... The programmer says "Let's just get out and get back in again."
The bartender waits a minute for him to finish. He asks the first one, "What's wrong with your friend?" The programmer replies, "He's a Haskell programmer. He's waiting for you to bring him his drink before he finishes ordering it."
It's funny because it's true.
He couldn't get arrays.
I replied "equals FF".
:- False
:- No.
These are programming jokes 'in action'.
Still good though.
9 programmers appeared before the boss One of them did not know FoxPro, and there were 8 of them left.
8 programmers bought IBM, One said "Mac is better!" And there are 7 of them left.
7 programmers wanted to read help, One of them got bad block on the disk, and there are 6 of them left.
6 programmers tried to understand the code, One of them went crazy and there are 5 of them left.
5 programmers bought a CD-ROM, One brought a Chinese disc - there were four left.
4 programmers worked in C, One of them praised Pascal, and there were 3 of them.
3 programmers on the net played DOOM, One hesitated a little, and the score was equal to two.
2 programmers typed together: "win" One tired of waiting for the download - there was only 1 left.
1 programmer took control of everything, But he met with the user, and there were 0 of them left.
0 programmers were scolded by an angry boss, Then he fired one, and it became their FF.
1974 Kemeny and Kurtz go to 1964.
From A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of Programming Languages.
http://james-iry.blogspot.com/2009/05/brief-incomplete-and-m...
What is the best thing about telling a UDP joke? You don't care if anyone gets it.
Naming things, cache eviction, and off by one errors
0) Cache invalidation 1) Naming things 5) Asynchronous callbacks 2) Off-by-one errors 3) Scope creep 6) Bounds checking
O(Chrome)
"Calling it Computer Science is like calling surgery 'knife science'." (Also Dijkstra, I think.)
"Artificial Intelligence is when the machine wakes up and asks, 'Hey, what's in it for me?'."
"There are two hard problems in computers: naming, cache invalidation, and off-by-one errors." (Funny 'cause it's true.)
"Which will attain self-awareness first, Wolfram or Wolfram Alpha?" (A little mean-spirited, perhaps, but funny. I respect Dr. Wolfram, I suspect he's one of the people that, a thousand years from now, folks will still be talking about when you and I are long forgotten.)
(ok, this one's actually a logic joke...)
Three philosophers walk into a bar, and the bartender asks: "Do you all want a drink?"
The first one says "I don't know."
The second one says "I don't know."
The third one says "Yes!"
Logician number one does not know whether logicians number two and three want a drink or not, so he can’t say yes. If he did not want a drink though, he could say no because then it would not be true that they all wanted a drink. But he wants a drink. Therefore he says he don’t know, because it will depend on whether the other two want drinks or not.
Same applies to logician number two. She is still missing info about the third logician and therefore says she doesn’t know.
The third logician now knows that both of the other two want drinks, and so can answer that all of them want drinks.
If either of the first two didn't want a drink, they would be able to answer "no". They each started off knowing one of the terms in that logical AND above. (They know their own preferences are either "yes" and "no" but they aren't yet aware of the others' preferences, and they each know the others know that.)
For example, if (A wants a drink) is false, then the whole predicate is false. So if A didn't want a drink, A would've said "no". But instead they say "I don't know". They could only have not known if they actually do want a drink but are unsure whether both of the others also do. But after the first two people each say something that reveals they do want a drink, the third person "C" knows that:
1. A wants a drink (or they would have said "no")
2. B wants a drink (or they would have said "no")
3. C wants a drink (knowledge of their own preferences)
and finally has enough information to conclude that the overall predicate is true.
The first hadn't heard from the others but wants a beer so can't deny the universal.
The second hadn't heard the last but wants a beer so can't deny the universal.
Neither the first or second could deny the universal so therefore they want beer and so does the last so that one can reply yes.
/Sigh, I explained it.
[Edit: and then noticed three others had already but I was too incensed to read beyond the ask. /Sigh]
Each program has at least one big. Also, a program can always be shortened by a line. Therefore, every program can be shortened to a single line that doesn't work.
Also:
Why do Java programmers wear glasses?
Because they can't C# ;)
The physicist aims his rifle at a deer, shoots, and misses six feet to the right.
The chemist aims, shoots, and misses six feet to the left.
The statistician exclaims "By golly we got him!"
None. The light is working in here so it must be working there too.
In this vein, I can recommend the book The Tao of Programming by Geoffrey James. There are also collections of funny anecdotes like “COMPUTER-RELATED HORROR STORIES, FOLKLORE, AND ANECDOTES”¹, “Computer Stupidities”² and the pre-MacOS X Macintosh-related collection of “folklore”³. There is also the classic “AI koans” collection⁴.
If what you want is something more like a personal biography (like the classic Feynman books), I can suggest The Network Revolution: Confessions of a Computer Scientist⁵.
1. https://www.cs.earlham.edu/~skylar/humor/Unix/computer.folkl...
2. http://www.rinkworks.com/stupid/
Rootless Root — The Unix Koans of Master Foo:
http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/unix-koans/
The Tao Of Backup:
Git Koans
I tell it like I am someone serious but a bit dumb who thinks it's really funny and is too stupid to see how dumb this is.
Only work in French and I set up the stage by being me at the beginning and telling it in front of programmer or it people and non it people so IT people have to confirm it's stupid and the joke is in how my personna thinks it's funny.
This makes me laugh.
A few usually believe I am serious.
What usually happens is the IT guys look at me, sighing and non verbally confirm to non-IT people that the joke is way too stupid and geeky to explain.
Most problems in computing can be solved by adding an additional layer of abstraction or indirection
...except for problems resulting from too many layers of abstraction or indirection.
So a programming language walks into a bar and says “hello world”
Warnings, but no errors.
An orthoplist.
NB: my coworkers gave me a weird look when I told them this handmade nerdy joke, hope it will pull one or two smiles here
There are aleph null bottles of beer on the wall, take one down, pass it around, aleph null bottles of beer on the wall.
So the programming joke:
The managers, especilally mid-level, and project owners.
Two bytes meet. The first byte asks, "Are you ill?" The second byte replies, “No, just feeling a bit off.”
How did the Three Wise Men find their way to baby Jesus?
A*
1) what to name your variables
2) cache invalidation errors
3) off-by-one errors
The canonical version of this is "naming things". It's more general than just variable names as anyone who has dealt with a thingAbstractFactoryFactory or the problem of generating unique names in a distributed environment will attest.
The other string, seeing at how the bartender is taken aback by the unexpected barrage of abuse, hastens to apologize: "You have to excuse my friend; he's not properly null terminated".
TCP in the streets UDP in the sheets
http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2006/03/execution-in-kingdom...
It's not DNS
There's no way it's DNS
It was DNS
Their vacuum cleaner!
Airport security caught a statistician try to sneak in a bomb in his baggage. The aprehened him and question him why he has a bomb with him:
"I calculated the probability that a flight will carry two bombs on board, and it is never likely to happen, so I brought one along."
At the declared time, the two beings open up spreadsheets, web-browsers, programming code, and all sorts of documents. As time wound down, it looked like the Devil was slightly superior at multitasking and was about to win the contest. Suddenly, the power goes out... and the Devil loses all of his work.
The Devil turns his computer back on, while sad about losing his work, he thinks he can still prove himself the better computer user. But as Jesus turns his computer back on, all of his work pops back up, and Jesus ultimately finishes the contest first.
----------
The Devil is perplexed. How did Jesus recover from the power-outage so quickly? So he asks and Jesus responds: "Because Jesus Saves".
BOOLSHIT!
Q: how many Microsoft engineers does it take to change a lightbulb?
A: none they just change the standard to darkness.
Fifteen. Five to do it, and ten to write document number GC7500439-001, Multitasking Incadescent Source System Facility, of which 10% of the pages state only "This page intentionally left blank".
Three: Two to hold it down, one to cut its head off.
no
Who’s there?
long pause
Java
GARBAGE COLLECTION!
When do we want it?
...
...
NOW!
Still I'd rather have a virus on my PC than my PP.
With a trojan of course, it's the other way around.
I would like to add to this, fuck you confluent with all your lies that you sell to gullible idiots.
Who's th--
RACE CONDITION.
The time limit is one day to create an Earth simulator. They begin, and both furiously code away without taking any breaks. Near the end of the day, there is a power outage and their computers are shut off.
Power is quickly restored. Satan is aghast! "I lost all my work", he exclaims.
Jesus just smiles, types few commands, and continues coding where he left off... because everyone knows: Jesus saves.
(Sort by top for some good ones)
enum Bool
{
True,
False,
FileNotFound
};
Also a more long form source of funny developer anecdotes was https://thedailywtf.com/
One's a human trying to conquer Mars and the other is an alien trying to conquer Earth.
Monzy - Kill Dash Nine https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fow7iUaKrq4
Googlers - Write in go https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJvEIjRBSDA
Okay, that said... some showing my age jokes:
Q: How can you tell COBOL programmer from other programmers? A: They're the ones with the stubby fingers
Q: How is Halloween and Christmas the same? A: Because OCT 30 = DEC 25! (Octal, Decimal....groan)
but don't listen to me, go to /r/ProgrammerHumor
It's early and I haven't had enough coffee
#Vim To enter external commands: "Say :! and enter"
Infinite Loop: see Loop, Infinite
tail recursion, n. See tail recursion.
None. The light's on in here so it must be on there too.
"Come by after work to meet the team and have a few beers".
I arrived around 7pm. There were quite a few people still around but to my surprise the tech lead who had hired me was packing up his desk into a box. I was kind of surprised but he seemed upbeat and glad to see me.
"Yeah, sorry to be leaving before you officially join the team. I got a great offer I can't pass up. Friends got their A round funding and it is an equity opportunity. You'll do great though. One piece of advice though,"
and he handed me three envelopes.
"Four pieces actually. Piece zero, and I'll tell it to you now. When you run in to trouble blame me. After you've seen my code you'll probably think it is shit. Hell, you're smart, you probably think everybody else's code is shit."
He continued "When you can't blame me anymore open the first envelope for the second piece of advice. You'll know when." and we went off to meet the team and have a beer.
I officially started on Monday and it was going great for the first couple of months. Then a product manager started breathing down my neck why one of my features was late. I had been frustrated with how hard it was to add the feature to the existing code and I found myself blurting, "The problem is not with my code, it is all of the old code I am having to rewrite because it is so terrible". I realized I was using the old tech lead's first piece of advice. So I continued, "Man, the previous tech lead's code is absolute garbage. It is amazing the whole thing hasn't fallen apart already." Since everyone looked sympathetic I knew I had made a good move. For quite a long time I made sure I was working hard or at least look like I was working hard and occasionally grumbling about the shit I had to deal with.
After a couple of months I was still producing at a good rate but I had now "rewritten" or at least claimed to have rewritten most of the bad code. I could not longer use that excuse. One Monday morning before the weekly sprint meeting I realized I was in a bind. I needed make sure that I had lots of work on my current assignment if I was going to avoid being assigned to a new project with "the customer from hell". I only had a few minutes before the meeting and after nervous peeing (twice) I still had no solution. I suddenly remember the envelopes. Digging through my messenger bag I found them and grabbed the first. While in the restroom for a third nervous pee I opened the envelope sitting in the stall. There was a card inside with one word "Refactor" and I had my solution.
A few minutes later at the sprint meeting I revealed that all my work rewriting the bad code, boy that was a lot of work, had revealed amazing opportunities to refactor the architecture and put us on a lot better footing. It would take a lot of work but I knew what needed to be done and it would really pay off. This proposal got a number of cautious nods and after a short discussion it was decided that I would proceed with a major refactoring of the product architecture.
A couple months later and my "refactor" was nearing completion. It did fix a few problems, the new APIs were more aligned with my personal preferences and I had gotten the chance to replace a few libraries with trendy ones that I wanted to get on my resume. Honestly though I felt like a fraud; my refactoring was just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. I played out the ending stages of the refactoring but inevitably the time came when management was eager to use the new code in a product. Having no other option I agreed it was ready and that I was eager (not really) to see it shine in a product.
The first product to use it would be with another team. After the first meeting it was clear that they were really sharp and they immediately pointed out some shortcomings of my APIs and design. After a bit more wrangling they agreed that my module could meet their needs as long as I was dedicated to supporting it and them. My management agreed and they were now my customer.
Their product design proceeded and as they continued to get more experience with my module they kept finding new flaws in the API and bugs. I tried to fix them as quickly as possible but I was one person working to try to keep an entire team happy. I couldn't keep up. After a late night of bug fixing I was headed home exhausted in an Uber and wondering how I was going to be able to keep up. As I nearly drifted into sleep in the back seat I remembered the envelopes. I found the second envelope in my bag and opened it with the third solution, again one word. "Indirection".
Meeting with my "customer" on Monday I explained the bandwidth problems I was having meeting all of their team's requirements. I explained that what would work best is if they built a local interface in their project which called my API. That way the interaction between their system and mine would be localized and they would only have to make changes in one place if my API had to change. They had seen that I was tapped out trying to support them and agreed that they could build a local API which meshed better with their system that simply called my module to do the actual work. It took them a while to disentangle their code from my module and build their interface. By the time they came back with a few bug reports against the version of my module they had been using I promised them that I had much improved version to use. Once a few bugs were resolved the systems were again integrated.
They got closer to shipping their product and I kept getting bug reports from them that my library wasn't behaving correctly. I was forced to explain that the problems they described hadn't been there when they had integrated directly against my library--the problem must be in their local interface. Progress was being made towards shipping the product but there were still frequent mysterious problems.
Meanwhile my management was pretty happy with how integration of my code was proceeding. My director had talked about it as a collaboration success story at an executive meeting. My team members, who I had little interaction with as I was supporting the other team, were also congratulatory though they didn't seem to be as believing that I deserved my apparent success. I was pretty sure it was going to be a disaster actually. So when a college buddy emailed me about a business plan he was writing I offered to help. A few days later they were talking about me being the "Software VP" for their startup. I wasn't sure but it would be a founder position with equity so I couldn't just say no. I was trying to figure out what to do when I got an email saying that the team building a product with my module was having real problems with their scaling tests. They had done some analysis and were certain the problem was with my module, they didn't have proof, but had some pretty compelling analysis and wanted to meet tomorrow. Gulp. Just then my manager came by, apparently not having read the memo yet and introduced me to a fresh young programmer who was joining the team. He introduced me as one of the team's stars and he should seek me out for mentoring. I politely agreed but had other things on my mind.
Stewing in my cube without much clue how to fix the reported problems before the upcoming meeting I thought back to mentoring I had received and realized I had one more envelope.
Opening the third envelope I discovered the fourth piece of advice. It was brilliant. I called my friend and told him I was "down" to be the software VP for their startup, contacted the new kid on our team slack inviting them to come by for an overview on my module. I then sat down wrote my resignation email and completed the fourth piece of advice, "Recursion."
A while later he arrives home with six loaves of bread. When he sees the puzzled expression on her face he says, "Why, they did have eggs."
A classi one by Anton van Straaten that is both funny and wise.
The cursor.
@steveklabnik · Jan 5 if a cow changes some state, you'd call that a moo-table variable
"We've run out of milk, so buy a carton. Oh, and if they have eggs buy six of them."
The programmer dutifully heads to the shop and returns with six cartons of milk.
(Integer joke)
—
Can you milk a bool?
False.
https://www.smart-jokes.org/how-it-projects-really-work.html
The husband comes back with 12 butters and says: "They had eggs."
Who's got 10 thumbs and only tells programming jokes? this.guy
“Once upon a time, a baby bear asked his mama to tell him a story about recursion, the mama bear started reading:
...””
What is a four-letter word name for a language that you write once and run anywhere?
Perl.
What’s the diff between a junior programmer and a senior programmer? s/junior/senior. Also only the junior will laugh at that joke.
Wife: “So, is it a boy or girl?”
Programmer: “Yes.”
He didn't like the table layout.
I just don't see this recursion going anywhere, we keep having the same arguments. Please don't call me anymore.
There are only 10 types of people in this world. Those who understand binary and those who don't.
Jenkins Khan.
chown -R us ./base
(probably for the old-timers among us ;))
So now All your base are belong to us (https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/all-your-base-are-belong-to-u...).
q: what is extreme form of amd fan boy programmer ? ans : they even refuse to run their code on Intel cpu even when the dev pc has intel cpu. they run everything in shaders in amd gpu so it doesn't touch intel cpu . bonus : what about boilerplate for running shaders on gpu ? ans : they hire a guy to write that for them. not touching intel in any case
If you ask a programmer, 'Do you want tea or coffee?' he will reply 'yes'.
and
q: What's Benoit B. Mandelbrot's middle name? a: Benoit B. Mandelbrot
(That said I really want to say something about JS, but I doubt everyone here will appreciate it ;-)
In FORTRAN, by default, any variable name that starts with I,J,K,L,M or N is an integer, otherwise it is a real type.
There are three hard problems in programming: naming, cache expiration and off-by-one errors.
Programmer's partner: While you're out, could you buy some milk?
And the programmer never returned.
"How is that possible?" asks her friend.
"Well, the first one was too old and couldn't do it. The second was gay and wouldn't do it".
"The third one was a computer salesman and all he did was sit on the edge of the bed telling me how great it was going to be."
(From the 70's days of the million-dollar mainframes)
How many software engineers does it take to change a lightbulb?
(None. It's a hardware problem)
A Haskell programmer describes how one would join them for a drink.
it was a fast foyer transform
To this day he is still buying eggs.
- Cache invalidation
- Naming things
- Off-by-1 errors
Software engineers doesn't believes in God...
I'd tell you a UDP joke, but you might not get it.
0. Naming things.
1. Cache invalidation.
2. Off-by-one errors.
(just found some attribution to: Leon Bambrick)
A: other side. get to the To
!false It's funny, because it's true!
...unless explicitly declared to be integer..."
<g>
Because the curl of a conservative field is always zero.
They can’t, it’s an hardware issue
Student: "Aaah, verb, to curse again?"
The bartender says: we don't serve race conditions here A thread walks into a bar
How did the programmer die in the shower?
'Lather, rinse, repeat'
Race condition
Who’s there?
Because 10 11 12
A coHaskell programmer turns de into ffee.
Baa-bel
# cd /etc
# emacs hosts
# rm * ~
# ls
# lsProgrammer: Yes.
> got a light?
zsh: no matches found: light?Always take care you don't get Descartes before Deshorse.
* cache invalidation
* naming things
* off by 1 errors
B: No
A: Inheritance!
"NOW!"
"ASYNC FUNCTIONS!"
"When Do We Want It?"
Maybe
Knock knock. “Race condition.” “Who’s there?”
Maine.
#define true 0
#define false 1
I think they're the only web comic dedicated to programmers (excpet of course xkcd).
Race condition.
Who's there?
"Compiler? I don't even know her!"
Badum bum.