Some funny engineering/programmer jokes

A priest, a doctor, and an engineer were waiting one morning for a particularly slow group of golfers. The engineer fumed, “What’s with those guys? We must have been waiting for fifteen minutes.” The doctor chimed in, “I don’t know, but I’ve never seen such inept golf.” The priest said, “Here comes the greenkeeper. Let’s have a word with him.”

The priest said, “Hello George, what’s wrong with the group ahead of us? They’re rather slow, aren’t they?.” The greenkeeper replied, “Oh yes, thats a group of blind firemen. They lost their sight saving our clubhouse from a fire last year so we always let them play for free at any time.”

The group fell silent for a moment.

The priest said, “That’s so sad. I think I will say a special prayer for them tonight.,”

The doctor said, “Good idea. I’m gonna contact my optomologist colleague and see if there’s anything he can do for them.”

The engineer said, “Why can’t they play at night?”

Stolen from https://journeys.dartmouth.edu/folklorearchive/2017/11/13/go...

The 'walking off' prevention tags are brilliant.

At a previous company I worked at in a niche field, we had several field specific control units used for development and debugging (you pretty much couldn't work without these). They were just expensive enough to have to jump through hoops to buy them, and just cheap enough that all hell didn't break loose if one got lost, loaned (permanently) to a client, etc. Consequently, we were always short, and people tended to furiously guard 'their' equipment (to the point of lying about having one on hand, when asked). Due to testing during development the units were also quite prone to being blown (usually easily repaired, but enough of a nuisance for a pile of broken ones to be around, in case of absolute emergency).

How did one of my co-workers solve the problem? Labeled all his equipment as 'Broken' in his handwriting...

SICP [1] has a good one in a footnote: Numbers that fool the Fermat test are called Carmichael numbers, and little is known about them other than that they are extremely rare. There are 255 Carmichael numbers below 100,000,000. The smallest few are 561, 1105, 1729, 2465, 2821, and 6601. In testing primality of very large numbers chosen at random, the chance of stumbling upon a value that fools the Fermat test is less than the chance that cosmic radiation will cause the computer to make an error in carrying out a ``correct'' algorithm. Considering an algorithm to be inadequate for the first reason but not for the second illustrates the difference between mathematics and engineering.

One that I'm rather fond of is: "An engineer thinks his equations approximate reality. A physicist thinks reality approximates his equations. A mathematician doesn't care."

[1] https://mitpress.mit.edu/sites/default/files/sicp/full-text/...

> Chief engineer: You told me that you would finish the layout in three days. Engineer: Sure, but not threeconsecutive days!

Putting aside the humour for a moment, this is actually pretty good.

Youll never be as lazy as the person who named the fireplace

Teacher: Name an influential German philosopher.

Student: I can't.

Teacher: Correct!

Jokes and their Relation to the Cognitive Unconscious. Marvin Minsky. AI memo No. 603. November, 1980.

https://web.media.mit.edu/~minsky/papers/jokes.cognitive.txt

>JOKES and the Logic of the Cognitive Unconscious

>Marvin Minsky, MIT

>Abstract: Freud's theory of jokes explains how they overcome the mental "censors" that make it hard for us to think "forbidden" thoughts. But his theory did not work so well for humorous nonsense as for other comical subjects. In this essay I argue that the different forms of humor can be seen as much more similar, once we recognize the importance of knowledge about knowledge and, particularly, aspects of thinking concerned with recognizing and suppressing bugs -- ineffective or destructive thought processes. When seen in this light, much humor that at first seems pointless, or mysterious, becomes more understandable.

>Introduction

>A gentleman entered a pastry-cook's shop and ordered a cake; but he soon brought it back and asked for a glass of liqueur instead. He drank it and began to leave without having paid. The proprietor detained him. "You've not paid for the liqueur." "But I gave you the cake in exchange for it." "You didn't pay for that either." "But I hadn't eaten it". --- from Freud (1905).

[...]

>In the 1912 edition Freud, still perplexed about the purpose of nonsense, recounts a joke of this form: {11}

>"A man at the dinner table dipped his hands in the mayonnaise and then ran them through his hair. When his neighbor looked astonished, the man apologized: "I'm so sorry. I thought it was spinach."

[...]

    Flu

     A new disease is hitting the US, the Chinese Flu. The biggest symptom is that you wake up in the morning with the urge to manufacture a smart phone.

    © Copyright 2014 Mark W. Lund

Ah the good year 2014, where a Chinese origin pandemic was simply a joke

Also, Lund means penis in my language, so there is that for a two-fer

This is really HN content? Anyway, I like that he feels the need to specify "This joke is in the public domain"

This Mark Lund guy must be somebody's dad.

For me, the whole 2005 looking page was summed up with the last joke parody lyrics to “Who let the dogs out”. Thanks, Mark Lund, I wasn’t sure what this was for a second, but yea, it’s that.

I was interviewing somebody for a Prolog programming position.

I asked them what was the difference between call by reference and call by value.

They answered: Yes.

So I hired them.

> Everything in product development these days is about connectivity. One company just came out with a new silent smoke alarm. When it detects smoke it sends you a text, tweets your friends, and posts a picture of the fire on facebook.

I must be too cynical to believe that's not a joke, but real.

Immutable, functional programming joke.

    X country can never join the G5. 
    Because if it did, it would become G6.

In the first minute reading, it managed to be both racist and sexist, but not funny once. :(

A resistor is a rebel.

A capacitor is one who doesn't let anything flow unless things change or lets everything out all at once.

An inductor is like a conductor without the trains.

Keep your [thing] in a vise. -AvE

A wife asks her software engineer husband, "Honey, can you please go to the store, buy a gallon of milk and if they have eggs, get a dozen."

He leaves for the store. An hour later, he returns with 12 gallons of milk.

His wife stares at him furiously and said "Why on Earth did you get 12 gallons of milk!?"

"Well... they had eggs." he said.