One of my all time favorites. Can’t remember where I first read it (Quora?), but it’s currently my top Google hit for “balloon programmer project manager joke”. [0]
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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."
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."
A helicopter was flying around above Seattle...malfunction disabled... aircraft's electronic navigation and communications equipment...
....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...
I have to note that this pilot is always getting into technical problems, and seems to know all the software companies in Seattle and how they are likely to respond - conclusion - the helicopter pilot is a project manager.
This joke must have been written by a journalist who's never been to Microsoft and doesn't bother to fact check their work, since the Microsoft campus is in Redmond and the tallest buildings there are only six stories high.
Project managers wouldn't read the story anyway, they cough up the headline and maybe a few lines of text and expect the team to fill in the blanks during multiple refinement meetings.
They're actually more common than engineers with understanding of project management or the concerns that they quite reasonably have. And they're way more valuable than a zug-zug eng.
I say this as a pure engineer who has been a lead many times but never a PM.
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 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"
As much as I like the joke and of course understand the analogy, I don't see how, from this conversation, the programmer comes to the conclusion that he has to solve the managers problem. The manager just asked, the programmer gave a technical correct answer and the manager replied that it doesn't help him. But at no point was the programmer expected to solve the managers problem nor has he blamed him so that it's "his fault".
I think it plays around a common case of a manager saving their ass in front of superiors by shouldering the blame on an unsuspicious employee (“what were you doing all these months, what’s the state of the project, and how are you planning to deliver?”). With time the latter becomes experienced enough to not take the blame, and detects these attempts easily, because it is always happen to be “their” fault.
(Sorry if that was obvious and you meant something else.)
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)
I'm reminded of a joke I heard from a talk by the philosopher Dan Dennett:
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 Soviet engineer needs some plumbing done in his apartment, and calls for a plumber. The plumber arrives, does his thing, and hands over the bill.
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!'
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!"
I've heard a variation of that were the professor is at a bar with a couple of visiting professors. He tells them, in this town pretty much everyone is smart and he proves it by asking the waitress. (The rest of the joke is the same.)
You can arrive at the same by slicing in nearly any manner you wish: vertical dx strips, horizontal dy strips, radial dtheta strips, concentric rings treated as rectangles, diagonal strips, literally anything you wish.
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.
I heard this one but it's a mathematician and a physicist in the balloon, and the physicist says the person must be a mathematician. As told by a math professor...
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.
Which was the first comedian you named in response to the question? Was it Kevin, Sarah, or Bert?
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.
I think maybe the programmer has forgotten to replace the mock data with a real data feed and he tells everyone who asks the same incorrect latitude and longitude no matter where they are.
I also enjoy a similar one where instead of the programmer stands a statistician and instead of project manager a principal investigator.
Source: https://stats.stackexchange.com/a/12745
Meanwhile, no effort is made on either side to make progress. It is not a joke about software programmer or project manager, it is about self-centered irresponsible people.
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.
I know this joke, but in the version I've heard it's mechanical engineering students instead of programmers, their professors instead of conference participants, and the aircraft itself instead of the flight control software.
This is an oldie (I first heard it in the 80s) but is one of my all time favorites. While it can be told about any two classes of people it really applies to a lot of code I encounter:
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?"
I think of this whenever I read code that contains a gratuitous state variable that explains the type or content of some data structure rather than make the data structure self-explaining. Even more annoying when it's a class.
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.
"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?"
Similar physics mystery: You're a pool of water in the bottom of a bucket, looking out at the stars. Somebody spins the bucket, making the stars spin. So you (the water) arrange your molecules in a parabolic shape, thicker at the sides of the bucket and thin in the middle.
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?
Love the joke, but to me it points to something else than gratuitous state variables. I think of it as "if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail", with the hammer being "procedurally solving problems".
Could you share an example of this? I could be misinterpreting this but say you're building a survey system and you need to keep track of answer types (e.g. text, date, etc) and the answer itself, how can you collapse that into one field?
Your thermos does not have a switch which you must set to "hot" or "cold" before inserting a liquid, handles solids as well as liquids, and doesn't require you to even think where the theshold might lie between the "hot" and "cold" settings. Instead it just does its best to prevent an energy exchange in either direction without having to even know the variables involved. And the "same subroutine" is basically used for different sized thermoses.
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:
So instead of just checking if a filter has been assigned, you have a separate boolean. What happens if the boolean is true but the filter is null? What would the vice versa case even mean?
The global codebase is riddled with dumb errors like this.
Even better, let's just have the default orderFilter be the equivalent of '*'.
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".
Yep! On of the things I point out most frequently in code reviews are things like this. However, null is an imperfect system for capturing such state. It's not self-documenting, and it breaks down when you have more than 2 states to represent.
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.
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
And the variety of code that has to work with either of these examples.
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)?
I'm not sure they were suggesting using type-specific sentinel values (like null and nan), but to always use null or point to a value.
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"
100% agree - it's a quite common trap for inexperienced developers to write down every cases and conditions separately, when they shouldn't. As a similar example, instead of writing "req.source = host + port", people would write:
After a few quarters of services, layers, and people being added and removed, it becomes a 500-line monstrosity and sits in every critical path. And because now it's a 500-line class (half of which is defunct, but good luck figuring out which half), nobody has time to read through it and figure out that it should have been a single assignment statement.
Having the two separated gives the ability to disable/re-enable the filter without losing it. That's often very useful. In other cases you're very right.
In something like typescript you could represent this as a union type. If I'm expecting a location I could take a string ("Baghdad"), lat long pairs, an enum, etc. With a union type I can specify that it could be any of these but they fill the same purpose. In Java I'd either do method overloading or expect to receive an object that implements a method that would give the location in a common format. The wrong way to do it would be to have a function that has both a lat/long input and a string input and just say that they're nullable and we only expect to get one of them.
I think they are referring to this sort of thing (the reader will have to use their imagination and assume there is additional functionality in this class):
class ReadingMaterial:
is_magazine = False
def is_periodical():
return is_magazine
Using a base class (e.g. a Magazine and a Book class, or something) and inheritance, is much clearer than monkeying around with state.
In graphics programming the typical example of this pattern would be when someone does bespoke computations on coordinates with a bunch of if-elses instead of deriving the proper matrix equation that "just works" due to math.
Reminds me of our five value boolean we used to have: is_deleted. Woe to person who expected that to be 1 or 0. Five distinct and overloaded values were possible, though I now forget them. Probably something like pending, fully deleted, being restored, not deleted, and restored.
A doctor, an architect and a programmer talk about their professions. "Mine is the oldest", says the doctor, "as everybody knows God created Eve from the rib of Adam, and that's definitely a medical operation". "Right", says the architect, "but in fact architect is even older - it's definitely an architectural project to create the world from chaos". At this point programmer kicks back in the chair and gives friends a mysterious look. "Who, do you think, created the chaos?"
A programmer walks into a bar and ask for a drink. The bartender says I'll give you a drink if you tell me a programmer joke. And he says: a programmer walks into a bar and ask for a drink. The bartender says I'll give you a drink if you tell me a programmer joke. And he says: a programmer walks into a bar and ask for a drink. So he gives the guy a drink, so he gives the guy a drink, so he gives the guy a drink.
... (continued): The bartender gives him a puzzled look and says, "I didn't get it", to which the programmer responds "To understand recursion you must first understand recursion."
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...
An infinite number of mathematicians walk into a bar. The first one orders a beer. The second one orders half a beer. The third one orders a fourth of a beer. The bartender stops them, pours two beers and says, “You guys should know your limits.”
Is it? In the outer "real world" the bartender will give the programmer a drink for a joke. It could be a knock-knock joke or anything, but the programmer makes it recursive. Thus making the whole thing a joke to us, otherwise it would be a knock-knock joke embedded in a pointless programmer/bartender reference.
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?
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.
I just came up with a variation to this off the top of my head.
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.
It's very simple: you test things because we can't rely 100% on developers to create the right thing or to create it without any bugs. The same goes for automated test software. I've personally created unit tests that were failing for like 2 years but due to a bug still showed green in CI.
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.
It's not an either/or though. Used to have an assignment where we as developers would write automated tests (regression tests), while we had an experienced software tester with an excel sheet verifying things by hand. But instead of just following the sheet - which is automatable - he knew of a number of different techniques and approaches and he'd still find a lot of issues that nobody else found. For which we'd write a test to avoid it happening again.
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".
It's weird how many bugs I regularly find in our software by actually testing things by hand, as opposed to our QA department, which does only automated testing and insists they have covered 100% use-case scenarios.
There's an old Joel on Software one related to string concatenation:
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!"
This could be a metaphor for how a greenfield project turns into a tiresome upkeep effort, after the initial creativity gets further and further buried under the maintenance strain.
A software engineer, a priest, and a doctor are trying to enjoying a round of golf. Ahead of them is a group playing so slowly and inexpertly that in frustration the three ask the greenkeeper for an explanation. “That’s a group of blind firefighters,” they are told. “They lost their sight saving our clubhouse last year, so we let them play for free.”
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?”
Haha, yes, that is so typical us programmers. We always know best and ofcourse there is a simple solution that fixes everything without even having to code a single line. But what if they enjoy the feeling of the sun on the skin while golfing? What if they are not completely blind but can see dark/light shades? This makes it much easier to keep balance.
This is an amalgam of two half-remembered jokes, but I think it works.
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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!"
It's often said that software engineers have no code of ethics. This is untrue. For example, no respectable software engineer would ever consent to writing a function called DestroyBaghdad().
Professional ethics would compel them to instead write a function DestroyCity, to which "Baghdad" could be passed as a parameter.
> 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.
Sometimes you might want to know success though. So...
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.
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."
Depending on the language the ampersand could mean by copy or by reference. I suspect the commentor wants by reference, since they want to examine it later.
> Depending on the language the ampersand could mean by copy or by reference
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.
I generally learn a new language by cargo-culting my way through a few small-ish programs. I wouldn't put anything in production in a language that I didn't adequately understand, but I could certainly waste a bunch of time debugging if I got the meaning of & flipped.
An infinite number of mathematicians walk into a bar.
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."
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!"
Yeah that does push it a bit, but the joke is that she didn't understand what he was talking about with the 'onethirdxcubed', mis-parsing it without context. But when asked the integral, she knew the answer; not because she'd been told.
Or in the beginning she’s playing dumb in condescension to the man. The man is trying to prove a point he doesn’t believe. He’s treating her as if she is dumb and doesn’t know the answer, but she does know, and in the end proves she knows it by providing a more complete answer than even the man himself. (You have to assume she knows about the question as the man is telling her the answer.)
The version of the joke I'd heard doesn't include the waitress' attempt to meaninglessly memorize the answer. She simply nods when initially tutored, then later surprises both mathematicians that "an average person" knows how to properly solve an integration problem without any help.
The waitress is a high functioning autistic. She knows calculus, but cannot work out a mishearing of natural language in a noisy environment, and just memorizes the raw phonemes with meaningless word divisons.
Well, the joke is a play on those gender stereotypes, the blonde waitress clearly knows much more then even the optimistic mathematician expects. The butt of the joke here is the university system and the jobs market.
Seems very unlikely? This joke is obviously punching up instead of punching down. Feel like a lot of people worried about cancel culture have some kind of bogeyman in their head that doesn't reflect reality at all.
Even if that wasn't the case: the niche nature of the joke protects you against global outrage
I wish it was a bogeyman. The Donglegate happened because someone overheard a joke between two friends. Then people have been fired. I'm very, very careful about every joke I tell and who is around.
Did you stop reading then? Because the actual joke is that even the guy that thought the average person numerate stereotyped her as dumb and was wrong.
An absurd example of a 'blonde joke' to object to if you're going to.
I think the idea is that the one who would feel offended by this joke, could also only see the trope and not the fact it was rejected. And if you dare to explain it, you automagically end up in a deadlock.
It also unlocks the tactic “I will play dumb for a while so you don’t feel too smart anymore”. If you want to continue to do good, don’t open up for stupid attacks — politics 101.
I prefer snappier versions of the first half, like:
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."
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...
Hey, it's not cool to steal jokes from /r/antiantijokes. I am a mod there (as evident from my username), and don't appreciate this. The joke is hilarious though.
One is about "Or" statements and the other is about "And" statements.
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.
The waitress asked if they would ALL like dessert. If the first logician did NOT want dessert, then they could safely answer "no", because then it would not be the case that ALL of the logicians want dessert. Since they do not answer no, we can assume they do want dessert. The same follows for the second logician. The third (who also wants dessert) has heard their colleagues answer, and knows that if either of them did not want dessert they would have answered no, and can therefore now answer "yes, we would all like dessert".
First of all, the joke makes no sense if you put a logistician instead of logician. Second, if you ask one person a question related to the opinions of all others, logically they can't answer yes or no, the only possible answer is "I don't know." Only when you reach the last person you have a chance of giving a definite answer.
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.
No. "A && B && C" is only true when all three are true. If A knows it does not want, they can answer "no", because there is no way "ALL want" is true in that case.
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!"
I thought the punchline was going to be, you know you're a programmer if you get hung up by the second sentence. How can he "[put] the frog *back* in his pocket." the first time after finding it by the road?
Reminds me of the joke about the talking dog at the flea market where the seller thinks he duped the buyer because "the dog is a liar".
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".
A physicist, an engineer and a programmer were in a car driving over a steep alpine pass when the brakes failed. The car was getting faster and faster, they were struggling to get round the corners and once or twice only the feeble crash barrier saved them from crashing down the side of the mountain. They were sure they were all going to die, when suddenly they spotted an escape lane. They pulled into the escape lane, and came safely to a halt. The physicist said "We need to model the friction in the brake pads and the resultant temperature rise, see if we can work out why they failed". The engineer said "I think I've got a few spanners in the back. I'll take a look and see if I can work out what's wrong". The programmer said "Why don't we get going again and see if it's reproducible?"
For context, I presume most of you have heard the old old joke that the two hard problems of computer science are cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-one errors. (Or the older joke that the two hard problems of computer science are cache invalidation and naming things.)
As virtual reality simulators assume larger roles in helicopter combat training , programmers have gone to great lengths to increase the realism of the their scenarios, including detailed landscapes and — in the case of the Northern Territory’s Operation Phoenix — herds of kangaroos (since groups of disturbed animals might well give away a helicopters position).
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).
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?"
As a Rubyist I laughed at that so hard my wife woke up. I work with Python on a daily basis now but I need to make a SFW variant and show it to the Ruby team.
As an Englishman, that symbol is "sharp" (or hash) which does two things. It makes the sex sound painful, then gives you a second smirk when you remember that it means "pound (£)" in American.
One possible cause of confusion in terms of a hash (#) being called pound (£) in the US was that (as I recall even in the mid-1980s) in many cases with ASCII/EBCDIC character set terminals and printers the same number code displayed as a # in the US but as a £ (pound) in the UK (eg ISO646 vs BS4730, or EBCDIC 297 vs 37).
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.
I guess it would prevent that kind of misunderstanding if the joke was written "C:££", but then again, the slight misreading I think adds to the joke when it is gotten.
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?"
I once worked on making a progress bar for a process that had a known number of tasks. Unfortunately not all tasks would take the same amount of time, and it was impossible to know the relative amount of time each task would take beforehand. I did the logical thing, and had the progress bar advance 1/nth every time a task completed, with an animation to make it less jarring. A few weeks later, the product manager came to me and told me I needed to make it so the progress bar kept slowly moving up if no tasks were completed for a certain amount of time, so the user would know that work was still being done. Fine. But what happens if the task takes so long that it goes past the mark for the next completed task? Well, when the task is actually completed, it moves backwards of course.
I made zeno's progress bar; it always keeps moving, but never quite finishes until you send it a :done: event, at which point it wastes half a second animating the remainder of the progress bar. Never had a single complaint, and no one noticed that it had nothing to do with what was going on under the hood.
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.
I used C/C++ for years, and I just don't believe that the world+dog quit creational design patterns. It was just now very easy to find a database connection pool for C++ that is exactly a connection factory. Would you mind clarifying your comment that almost nobody uses factory patterns in other languages with some sense of exactness as to what is and what isn't a factory?
Fair point if you read it literally and assume each thread is a problem. But I assume, as it's a variation of the regex joke, 'using threads' is seen as a singular thing. Perhaps it should say 'threading?'
The computer salesman was trying to convince the CEO to buy the horribly expensive mainframe.
"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."
The GNU Humour [0] collection may be of interest. Also Dylan Beattie has done some great songs on YouTube [1] (I especially like 'Bug in the JavaScript' and 'You Give REST a Bad Name')
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".
A programmer, an engineer, and a physicist are in adjacent hotel rooms. Each has a pitcher of water beside the bed. A fire starts in the wastepaper basket in each room.
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 programmer looks online for documentation on how to use the water, finds it too complicated, dumps the water out the window, then dumps the contents of the wastebasket out after it. Seeing the fire gone the programmer later goes on to give a conference talk about the importance of a good throwing arm in fire safety.
Variant I heard, had a physicist, engineer, and mathematician sharing a room.
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.
This isn't exactly a programming joke but considering how many of us physics majors become programmers, I think it works:
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.
In real life, an interviewer was talking to Werner Heisenberg. They were getting to the end of the interview, but before they wrapped up, the interviewer asked, "So, tell me Mr Heisenberg... What do you think of the jokes?"
Werner Heisenberg sat forward with a twinkle in his eye and said, "What jokes?"
A salesman, an engineer, and a programmer drive a rental
car up Pikes Peak. On the way down, the brakes fade,
and the one driving manages to skid to a stop in a cloud
of dust at the edge of a precipice.
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.”
The touchscreen in my car is wonky (known issue, just haven't bothered to fix it), so when something goes sideways with the Bluetooth audio, turning the car off and back on is easily the fastest way to get my music back.
Did you ever figure out that putting the clutch in, turning the engine off, moving the key back to the running position and releasing the clutch was the easiest way to do it?
I have had several cars I've had to do this in. Latest was a 2003 Vauxhall Vectra (Opel?) which needed this to get out of "limp mode" if you accelerated in 5th gear above 55mph.
Ain't cars fab?
Oh yeah, the reboot with compression start. My wife didn't like it tho. :)
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?"
I have a 37 year old car. The (classic looking) Bluetooth radio is by far the most complicated electronics on board.
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.
Put a toggle switch somewhere in the cabin and splice it between the car radio power wires and the battery. So you can easily reboot the radio without having to mess around under the hood.
A push button normally closed momentary switch would be pretty slick too. Also it would probably be best to put it on the ground wire. Car radios will have at least two power wires, one for constant power (which keeps the clock set, and favourite stations programmed), and one switched accessory power to command it on.
Then again, a new $30 radio would be slicker still.
I had a car with wonky turbo, where if you tried to push it too hard, turbine was disabled and you were left with very low power engine (but engine still worked). Briefly turning off ignition and turning it back on would restart turbine back to normal.
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".)
Someone else got downvoted to oblivion for this, though it deserves to be higher because it’s a classic: “I know a UDP joke, but I’m not sure you’ll get it”.
This is a variation on a joke I heard from the nerdy comedian Don McMillian... [1]
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?"
In Futurama, Bender has a nightmare in binary, "one's and zeros everywhere! ...and I think I saw a 2." Fry replies, "it was just a dream Bender, there's no such thing as 2"
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.”
A biologist, a physicist, and a mathematician are all watching a house that seems empty. Presently, two people enter the house, and after a while three people come back out.
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."
There isn't any significance to the fact that it's a root beer, right? That was slightly distracting. I wonder if this would be cleaner if it was a 7-up.
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 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.
cache invalidation is not hard indeed, but people always forget about it (so caches aren't caches aanymore, they become stale copies of things...). People tend to forget that a cache has to have a fixed size and an eviction policy.
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!
This is my programming version of another joke I heard:
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.
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."
When going to sleep, programmer puts to the table next to his bed a glass with water and an empty glass. The glass with water is in case he'll want to drink at night and the empty glass is in case he won't.
Funny, but I think even a lot of programmers won't realize it's a joke about how eliminating special cases / branches from code often makes the code look a little crazy at first glance.
The next morning he wakes up to find the first glass empty, the other full of an amber tinted liquid, and a stranger in bed with him.
"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."
I really like the 'Jon Skeet facts' Stackoverflow page. It is Chuck Norris style facts about the legendary Stackoverflow answer contributor. Here is the top answer but I find many in the thread funny.
- 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
In Europe, the surname of Niklaus Wirth (inventor of the Pascal programming language) is pronounced “veert”; in the United States, it’s pronounced “worth.“
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.
mildly interestingly, the word "algorithm" is actually someone's name, mangled:
> 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
To explain algorithms a little more clearly to less mathematical students I actually introduce traditional logarithms in case they are not familiar, in terms that are easier to understand.
For instance in a remote river with lumberjacks dancing on logjams without falling in the water, that's a type of logarithm at work.
Al Gore was ridiculed for saying he invented the Internet (he didn't say that). The rest of the joke is playing off of that and then punning with his name.
If that were the only sentence in the statement, sure. But read the rest (which I believe you found if you can quote it) and it's clear what he's saying unless your objective is to misquote it and ridicule him.
"I'll be offering my vision when my campaign begins. And it will be comprehensive and sweeping. And I hope that it will be compelling enough to draw people toward it. I feel that it will be. But it will emerge from my dialogue with the American people. I've traveled to every part of this country during the last six years. During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet. I took the initiative in moving forward a whole range of initiatives that have proven to be important to our country's economic growth and environmental protection, improvements in our educational system."
That's what I read from Wikipedia, I do not really see how this changes the statement.
Better, but still a bit shaky. Probabl 'I refunded Arpanet...' (in 1991 Gore Bill). Arpanet was started in 1966, and he is not that old. It is clear Gore was an important supporter of the expansion of the internet, but it is hard to put it in a catchphrase with doesnt sound like 'first I created heaven and earth...'
I agree with GP. The statement made sense to Gore but not to the bulk of his audience. The missing context isn’t in the words that follow. It’s in understanding the role Gore actually took in the creation of the internet; specifically to be its economic, legal, and political champion for basically decades.
A physicist, a mathematician and a programmer are in a car driving on a windy mountain path. All of a sudden as they round a corner, the brakes fail. After a few terrifying moments, the car skids to a halt and they emerged unscathed.
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."
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.”
You were hired as a foreman on a construction of a laboratory on the island. You arrive at the island and among unfinished buildings you see - a giant ventilator the size of a building, an air balloon ready to fly, and a room completely filled with a floor mops. After some head scratching you remove all this junk and complete the laboratory. But right after the scientists start their work you hear an alert - "ALARM, TOXIC GAS LEAK DETECTED!".
- 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.
If automotive transportation had advanced as fast as computing then cars would travel at the speed of sound, run completely on solar power, and cost about 50 cents. And every day thousands of them would drive to random locations and explode.
Pro tip: if you want to get someone a birthday card, just get them a card that says "10 years old!" on the front. Then use a sharpie to put an asterisk after the "10" and then on the inside of the card put: "* (in base X)", where X is how many years they are turning. Worked well for my 2 year old daughter as well as my 57 year old dad.
DEC WARS is full of great computer jokes. It's a 1983 Usenet posting by Alan Hastings and Steve Tarr: https://www.bsd.org/decwars.html
> 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...
Boy: dad, why the sun rises on the east and sets on the west?
Programmer: did you see that?
Boy: yes, I did.
Programmer: does it always works?
Boy: yes.
Programmer: don't touch anything.
Many years ago, this joke appeared in an April issue of the Communications of the ACM (before the Cray 3 actually existed):
"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."
Two people are taking part in a scientific study to investigate people's approaches to problem solving. One of the two is an engineer, the other is a mathematician.
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.
A mathematician, a physicist, an engineer, and a computer scientists are all asked to test the hypothesis that all odd numbers greater than 2 are prime. (Apologies in advance to engineers.)
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, ...
I've got an old one, not really however focused on programming.
<<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...">>
Maybe not quite a joke supposedly this happened for real
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!"
My favorite was resolving merge conflicts: type “a y” to accept your version of the diff, “a t” to accept their version of the diff, or “a j” to accept Jeff Dean’s version of the diff.
I think another asserted that Jeff Dean can parse HTML with regular expressions.
Two engineers are attempting to measure the height of a pole in the ground but as they extend their tape measure towards the sky it keeps collapsing.
A mathematician walks by and asks what they are doing and they say they’re trying to figure out the height.
The mathematician pulls the pole out of the ground and lays it down. He measures it and says “It’s 16 feet”.
As he’s walking away one engineer shakes his head and says, “Mathematicians...you ask them for the height and they give you the length!”
Two programmers walk up to the bar. The first one orders a beer. "Sure. And for you?" says the bartender to the second one. The second programmer replies, "Thanks, I'll have a"
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."
"Computer science could be called the post-Turing decline in the study of formal systems." (Dijkstra, I think.)
"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.)
The question is "Do you all want a drink?" They're all answering with the logical meaning of "all", where it's yes if and only if every single one of them wants a drink, not the common meaning. Their responses are the value of the predicate `(A wants a drink) AND (B wants a drink) AND (C wants a drink)`.
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 bartender asked if all of them wanted a drink.
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.
It’s a short circuiting conjunction. Consider `aliceWantsADrink && bobWantsADrink`. If Alice doesn’t want a drink, she knows it’s not the case that both of them want a drink. Since she says “maybe” instead of “no” she signals to Bob that she wants a drink, and so he concludes they both want a drink.
Yes, this was an inappropriate post that has no place here. I'm sorry to the parent poster and anyone whose enjoyment of the joke is blunted by this. I certainly didn't intend to be an insulting downer but I certainly don't expect anyone to read it as anything but intending to insult. I apologise.
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.
Programmers and computer scientists tend, in my experience, go for what is sometimes called Ha-Ha-Only-Serious (“HHOS”) type jokes. Meaning, statements that are true, but so piercing that they also are humorous.
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.
C'est un administrateur système qui reconfigure ses variables d'environnement et paf le chemin.
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.
Yes, it's only funny when you play the dumb/silly guy and people know "Paf le chien" (which is already absurd). French people usually pronounce Path and Paf in the same way and "Chemin" and "Chien" sounds alike.
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.
Einstein repeatedly argued that there must be simplified explanations of nature, because God is not capricious or arbitrary. No such faith comforts the software engineer.
A programmer and his wife moved to a new house.
When they arrived, he looked around and said, "I think the moving company ripped us off... I paid them to move 40 boxes of our belongings, but I count only 39."
His wife said, "Maybe you should count them again to make sure."
The engineer started counting again, saying, "Zero, one, two, three..."
So this will sound like bitter, burnt-out comment and honestly been there, did that... and now I'm bitter again due to recent events at my recent workplace, but again this is just a pattern I have recognized along the 25 years I've spent working on banking software and later after the burn-out with a large telco.
So the programming joke:
The managers, especilally mid-level, and project owners.
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.
Two strings walk into a bar. One of them immediately greets the bar tender and says, "I would like a pint of stout ale!$@%))34#,,3..."
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".
Once upon a time, Jesus and the Devil got into a computer contest, to see who was better with computers.
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".
A programmer walks into a bar and orders 1.00000000001000000...897175 root beers. The bartender says, "I'll have to charge you extra; that's a root beer float". And the programmer says, "In that case, make it a double".
How many IBM employees does it take to change a light bulb?
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".
I bought a giant bottle of shampoo at Costco and it almost killed me by hypothermia. I started the shower then made the mistake of reading the instructions. It said lather, rinse, repeat.
Jesus and Satan are having a programming contest to decide who gets to be God's right-hand man.
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.
Not exactly programming jocks, more like tech jokes, but I remember http://bash.org/?top to be an amazing source of humor back when I had my first steps as a techie 15 years ago
I don’t know if I a downvote because Zuckerberg doesn’t like being called an alien or because Musk doesn’t like being in the same sentence as Zuckerberg! O.o
I got a job as a software developer at a startup after several years of working as an IT drone. On my last day of work at my old job I got a text from the tech lead of the team I would be joining.
"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."
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.
I've been working on getting our Java code running on Windows. It's going alright, but I had to shut off the garbage collector altogether - whenever it runs, all of our JARs end up in the Recycle Bin.
- Can I have something to clean input/output ports, please? - programmer asks at a shop.
- Sorry? - Lady at the counter doesn't understand.
- I meant... eh... toothpaste and toilet paper please...
The Lord said: "Go Forth and Multiply," but the Forth programmers cried "Please, Lord, give us floating point!" (an oldie, because for the longest time FORTH was only fixed point)
A QA engineer walks into a new bar repeatedly, orders NaN beers, -1 beers and 256 beers. Satisfied they let the first customer in. The customer orders a beer. The bar explodes.
A programmer’s wife is pregnant and goes into labor. Programmer brings her to the hospital, she gives birth and the doctor hands the baby to the doting father.
I had an opportunity to ask Jeff Dean what his favorite Jeff Dean joke was and he said:
"When Jeff Dean opens the profiler, loops unroll themselves in fear"
just thought of this one . not much funny but has good potential
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
The economy turns bad and a programmer has to become a hammer hand to pay his rent. The builders are working on a new house, how do you tell them apart?
Mechanical engineer walks around the field and thinks - there is a field. Flowers grows on field. Bees are gathering honey from flowers, doing good for flowers. Sun is shining over whole ecosystem making everything grow. There must be an engineer, who planned that. God exists! I believe in God!
============
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...