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Erlkönig: Mostly computing jokes

Mostly jokes about computing
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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 pilot was giving tours of Washington state cities, when one day 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 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"

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..."

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.

If Java had true garbage collection, it would collect itself.

There was a doctor, a civil engineer, and a computer scientist sitting around late one evening, and they got to discussing which was the oldest profession. The doctor pointed out that according to Biblical tradition, God created Eve from Adam's rib. This obviously required surgery, so therefore that was the oldest profession in the world. The engineer countered with an earlier passage in the Bible that stated that God created order from the chaos, and that was most certainly the biggest and best civil engineering example ever, and also proved that his profession was the oldest profession. The computer scientist leaned back in her chair, and with a sly smile responded, "Yes, but who do you think created the chaos?"

The joke's context is Genesis chapters 1-2, so it wouldn't make sense to include a lawyer. Satan only shows up in chapter 3.

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.”

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!"

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?”

I'm a firefighter programmer and I liked this one.
I thought all programmers are firefighters...
The prize for being good at firefighting is being assigned more firefighting.
The way I program, I'm actually an arsonist.
For a moment there I thought you were the other firefighter programmer I know.

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!"

A QA engineer walks into a bar and orders a beer.

She orders 2 beers.

She orders 0 beers.

She orders -1 beers.

She orders a lizard.

She orders a NULLPTR.

She tries to leave without paying.

Satisfied, she declares the bar ready for business. The first customer comes in an orders a beer. They finish their drink, and then ask where the bathroom is.

The bar explodes.

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.

Sometimes you might want to know success though. So...
status = destroyCity(&city);
Because passing the city by copy is way too expensive and won't destroy the original city anyway.

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."

Three logisticians just finished dinner, and the waitress comes up and asks "do y'all want dessert?"

The first logistician says "I don't know." The second also says "I don't know." The last says "yes, we would."

A friend asks a programmer if they'd like to go bowling or go to the movies.

The programmer answers: "Yes".

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 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?"

I don't understand why people find DNS so difficult, it’s just cache invalidation and naming things.

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.)

>There are two hard problems in computer science: naming

concurrency,

>things, cache invalidation, and off-by-one errors.

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?"

"C:££"

A boy and a girl are sitting next to each other in a Java Computer Science class.

The boy reaches over and starts going through the girls purse.

The girl says: "Hey! That's private!"

The boy replies: "But we're in the same class!"

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".

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.

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."

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 next night, there's another fire in the programmer's room, but on the curtains. The programmer removes the curtains, puts them in the wastepaper basket, and says contentedly "Now it's a solved 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.

Programmer's wife: "when you go to the store, can you buy a carton of milk and if they have eggs, get six."

He comes back with 6 cartons of milk. Wife: "why would you buy six cartons of milk?"

"Well, they had eggs"

Programmers will use up all the shampoo if the label says "lather, rinse, repeat"

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 diameter."

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?"

A physicist, chemist, and programmer were going to lunch together.

When they got in the car though, it wouldn’t start.

“Maybe it’s out of gas?” said the Chemist.

“Maybe it’s a problem with the engine?” said the Physicist.

“Maybe if we all just get out of the car and get back in.”

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.
I had a Fiat Panda where the way to get power steering back after it flaked out was to do that. While driving.

Hi, I'd like to hear a TCP joke.

Hello, would you like to hear a TCP joke?

Yes, I'd like to hear a TCP joke.

OK, I'll tell you a TCP joke.

OK, I'll hear a TCP joke.

Are you ready to hear a TCP joke?

Yes, I am ready to hear a TCP joke.

OK, I'm about to send the TCP joke. It will last 10 seconds, it has two characters, it does not have a setting, it ends with a punchline.

OK, I'm ready to hear the TCP joke that will last 10 seconds, has two characters, does not have a setting and will end with a punchline.

I'm sorry, your connection has timed out... ...Hello, would you like to hear a TCP joke?

I would tell you a joke about UDP, but you probably wouldn't get it.

You wouldn't care if he got it anyway
That's the best thing about telling a UDP joke, you *don't* care if anyone gets it.

A russian, a french, and an irish archeologist are talking in a bar

french: we found copper wire in our last dig, it shows france invented networking

russian: we found glass strands in our last dig, it proves russia invented fibre optics

irish: we found nothing. It proves the irish invented wireless networks.

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"

Sometimes when I'm writing JavaScript I feel like throwing my hands up and saying "This is bullshit!" But I never know what "this" refers to.

If programming seems hard, it might be because you need to learn a separate discipline depending on the order of magnitude of your codebase LOC:

10⁰: Axiomatics

10¹: Logic

10²: Mathematics

10³: Computer Science

10⁴: Software Engineering

10⁵: Group Psychology

10⁶: Politics

10⁷: Crisis Management

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.

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."

My favourite:

"What do we want?"

"Now!"

"When do we want it?"

"Fewer race conditions!"

What do we want?

Time Travel!

When do we want it?

Doesn't matter!

C programmer is bartending. Someone says "get me a double whiskey, plus a root beer"

Drinks arrive, customer asks: "hey why is there ice cream in this?"

"I had to make it to a root beer float when you added it to the double"

Root beer should be a float regardless, in case beer isn't a perfect square.

Why do programmers hate legacy projects, you ask?

Well, imagine yourself in a situation where you are asked to finish the construction of a nuclear power plant on a remote island that your friend started.

You arrive on the island to discover quite unusual pieces of design in the project. Among other curiosities, you find a room full of broomsticks, a 90 foot tall fan and a hot air balloon. You think to yourself - what a silly idea, who needs all those things in a power plant? - and your first steps are to remove all those unnecessary dingbats.

A few months of hard work later, you have finished the construction of the power plant. You and a few scientists gather in the control room and power the thing up for the first time for a test run. Everything seems to be working fine for a few minutes, but suddenly, everything lights up red - there is a radioactive gas leak!

You panic, because you have no idea what could have caused such an issue. You call your friend and ask for ideas. While you describe the situation to him, he is horrified.

  • Have you really gotten rid of the room with the broomsticks?
  • Of course! Why would you need a room full of broomsticks in a power plant?
  • They were holding up the weight of the reactor core! No wonder you have a radioactive gas leak!
  • My God, why did you not tell me? What should I do about the leak?
  • Don't worry, everything is fine, just turn on the 90 foot tall fan and it should blow the toxic gas away from the island.
  • What fan? Oh, this fan? I've gotten rid of it!
  • Why would you do that?! It was an important safety measure!
  • We'll argue about that later, people are dying in here! Is there anything else I can do?
  • You can't stay on the island, it is not safe. Just gather everyone in the hot air balloon and get the hell out of there!

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 prepared 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.

Another new guy walks in and finds this friendly group explaining how they joke by number.

They encourage him to give it a try and he enthusiastically says "18".

Nobody laughed at all.

Crickets.

He asks the guy next to him, "isn't 18 funny?"

"Yes, but you have to know how to tell a joke."

A full-stack developer is one who can add technical debt to any layer of the application.

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.

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 you're in."

There are only two hard problems in distributed systems:

2. Exactly-once delivery

1. Guaranteed order of messages

2. Exactly-once delivery

I heard that the two main problems in computer science is that we have only one joke and it's not very funny.

A biologist, a statistician, a mathematician and a computer scientist are on a photo-safari in Africa. As they're driving along the savannah in their jeep, they stop and scout the horizon with their binoculars.

The biologist: "Look! A herd of zebras! And there's a white zebra! Fantastic! We'll be famous!"

The statistician: "Hey, calm down, it's not significant. We only know there's one white zebra."

The mathematician: "Actually, we only know there exists a zebra, which is white on one side."

The computer scientist: "Oh, no! A special case!"

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.

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.

When Al Gore does it, that's an algorithm.

developer: so i have good news and bad news

manager: what's the good news?

developer: i've discovered that the "5 second rule" only applies to food

manager: and the bad news?

developer: i dropped our tables

"Assume we have 1000 apples, or let's take a round figure, 1024 apples."

      // get tomorrow's date
      int getTomorrowsDate() {
      sleep(1000*60*60*24);
      return getCurrentDate();
      }
    

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 leftovers 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..."

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!”

XML is like violence: if it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it.

Or: it's never the answer

The junior thinks that a kilobyte has 1000 bytes; a senior thinks that a kilometre has 1024 metres.

The problem with TCP jokes is that people keep retelling them slower until you get them.

Programming is like sex: make a mistake, and you just may end up supporting it for the next 18 years.

What is the collective noun for programmer?

Merge conflict.

Recruiter ask candidate developer: "So, why do you want to work in our office in Mexico?"

"Because I want to be a señor developer"

There are 10 kinds of people in the world:

Those that understand binary, those that don't, and those who weren't expecting a ternary joke.

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.

A byte tells his wife "Honey, I'm not feeling too well - I think I have a parity error".

She replies "I thought you looked a bit off!"

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.

“The trouble with programmers is that you can never tell what a programmer is doing until it’s too late.” — Seymour Cray

“Hardware eventually fails. Software eventually works” - Michael Hartung

Developer accused of unreadable code refuses to comment.

Why was there no popcorn at the next-gen OS conference?

Because nobody implemented the kernel!

"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?'."

I think I’ve had milk last longer than some JavaScript frameworks.

At an SF convention party, someone said, "To be or not to be".

I replied "equals FF".

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".

Why'd the programmer quit his job?

He couldn't get arrays.

"Simple, it's a monoid in the category of endofunctors."

Self-confidence (as a programmer): When starting a new project, storing the transaction ID in an int64 rather than an int32.

"Telling a programmer that there already is a library for X is like telling a songwriter that a song about love already exists."

(C) 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.

Pound! Bang! Bin! Bash! Is this a shell script or a Batman comic?

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.

I'd tell you an NP complete joke, but if you've heard one you've heard them all.

Moore’s Law giveth, JavaScript taketh away.

The best thing about NaN jokes is that they're all different.

There are aleph null bottles of beer on the wall, take one down, pass it around, aleph null bottles of beer on the wall.

A physicist, a chemist and a statistician go hunting.

The physicist aims his rifle at a deer, shoots, and misses six feet to the right.

The chemist aims, shoots, and misses six feet to the left.

The statistician exclaims "By golly we got him!"

It's not easy being a geek when there's spyware and all kinds of malicious programs out there, you never know what you're going to get.

Still I'd rather have a virus on my PC than my PP.

With a trojan of course, it's the other way around.

Do you know what are black holes? It's where God divided by 0.

"HEY, DOES ANYBODY KNOW A GOOD ARP JOKE?"

Why did the programmer swim in the crocodile river?

Warnings, but no errors.

What do we want?

GARBAGE COLLECTION!

When do we want it?

...
...

NOW!

How many programmers does it take to screw in a lightbulb?

A: What you need is light. Why are you assuming the solution involves a lightbulb?

If Java had true garbage collection, most programs would delete themselves upon execution.

My favorite programming joke goes something like

TCP in the streets UDP in the sheets

How many programmers does it take to change a light bulb?

None. The light is working in here so it must be working there too.

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.

Knock knock.

Who's th--

RACE CONDITION.

"Chuck Norris can instantiate an abstract class." :-)

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.

If a cow changes some state, you'd call that a moo-table variable

chown -R us ./base

Did you hear about the DSP engineer who remodeled the entryway in her house overnight?

it was a fast foyer transform

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."

"I once went to an ARP restaurant. Thank god I didn’t eat the food! It was poisoned.."

What’s the angriest part of a computer?

The cursor.

Horse walks into a bar. The bartender asks “Why the long face?” Horse replied: I tried a short but didn’t fit.

Can you milk a bool?

False.

Computers are like air conditioner, useful if you close windows.

I actually bought this T-shirt for my daughter.It said:

!false It's funny, because it's true!

In programming, as in life, a single missed period can be of great significance.

To err is human but to create utter chaos you will need a computer.

The only thing worse than a monorepo? Two monorepos.

Foo walks into a bar...

Syntactic sugar leads to cancer of the semicolon

Why do fish love programming in assembly? Because it's below C level

A: Have you heard about the object-oriented way to become wealthy?

B: No

A: Inheritance!

Which US state should any foreign developer visit first?

Maine.

There are two types of people. Those who can extrapolate from incomplete datasets.

An IPv6 packet walks into a bar, no one responds

My backslash escaped!

There are 10 kinds of programmers: those who know binary, and, uhm, nine others.

Q: Why did the multi-threaded chicken cross the road?

A: other side. get to the To

You’re my number 0

disencrypt lang [de jp fr] diff backlinks (sec) validate printable
Walk without rhythm and you won't attract the worm.
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