Anyone know any funny programming jokes?

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]

============

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...

(Not my joke)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?”

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.

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Nathaniel_Borenstein

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."

My favorite:

=====================

A Computer Programmer finds a frog by the side of the road.

The frog says, "I am actually a Princess! If you kiss me, I'll revert back to my human form and be forever grateful?", the programmer smiles and puts the frog back in his pocket.

Again, the frog says, "But I really am! I would even marry you if you kiss me and turn me back into a human!", the programmer chuckles and puts the frog away again.

Ten minutes later, the frog says, "Look, if you kiss me, I'll have sex with you all day, every day. Deal?", the programmer laughs and puts the frog away again.

He gets home, takes the now severely depressed frog out of his pocket and sets it down in an aquarium. The frog looks up at the coder and says, "What the fuck is wrong with you man? I offered to marry you, I offered to screw you, but STILL you won't turn me back into my human form."

The programmer says, "I'm a programmer. I don't have time for relationships, or sex - but a talking frog? SO COOL!"

=====================

credits to: https://www.reddit.com/r/Jokes/comments/8ylptx/a_computer_pr...

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 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?"

Slightly over analysed thread at: https://www.reddit.com/r/Jokes/comments/2wf5ge/a_mechanical_...

> Kubernetes is an Ancient Greek word meaning "More containers than customers."

https://twitter.com/srbaker/status/1002286820078571532

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

source: https://twitter.com/jdub/status/739110670562557952?s=20

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).

Source: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/shoot-me-kangaroo-down-spo...

Apparently a true story:

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?"

Not exactly programming per-se, but cute:

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?"

A programmer had a problem. He thought to himself: "I know, I'll solve this with threads!"

has Now problems. two he

I think I saw this on reddit years ago:

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"

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')

Here's a couple I remember from somewhere:

SEO expert walks into a bar...

...tavern, pub, taproom, alcohol, beer, wine, vodka...

Also, tangentially related:

A farmer wants to section off part of his field with a fixed length of fence. He is unsure what the best strategy is so he unwisely calls the local university, who send an engineer, a physicist and a mathematician.

The engineer makes a circle with the fence, declaring it to have the greatest area for any given perimeter length.

The physicist makes a straight line as far as the eye can see in either direction, and says that, to all intents and purposes, it goes all the way around the world and he has fenced in half the world.

The mathematician fences off a tiny one metre area around himself, and says "I declare myself to be on the outside".

[0] https://www.gnu.org/fun/humor.en.html

[1] https://www.youtube.com/user/dylanhat

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.

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.

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.”

These are both old, like me:

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".)

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

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?"

[1] Don McMillan - Greatest Charts (Volume 1) -- https://youtu.be/LYE3GtXqDV0

My favourite:

"What do we want?"

"Now!"

"When do we want it?"

"Fewer race conditions!"

What's the difference between an introverted programmer and an extroverted programmer?

The extroverted programmer looks at your shoes when he's talking to you.

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"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MOn_ySghN2Y

I went to a NodeJS party one time but I didn't like it, only one person could have fun at once.

Then I went to an Erlang party, and it was just a bunch of nerds at separate tables passing notes to each other about how much fun they were having.

But the weirdest was the Haskell party. Nothing happened for six hours and then suddenly everyone said "Well, that was fun!" and went home...

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.

Tom Knight and the Lisp Machine

A novice was trying to fix a broken Lisp machine by turning the power off and on.

Knight, seeing what the student was doing, spoke sternly: “You cannot fix a machine by just power-cycling it with no understanding of what is going wrong.”

Knight turned the machine off and on.

The machine worked.

Source: http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/koans.html

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 favorite, which I repeat a lot:

The reason God was able to finish the earth in only six days is that He didn't have to worry about backward-compatibility.

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"

It's a bit more mathematical then programming but aren't we all just shitty mathematicians anyway:

Little John goes to school for the first day. The teacher wants to assess what do the kids already know so she asks

"Who knows how much is 1+2?".

Little John raises his hand and says

"I don't know how much is 1+2 but I do know that it's the same as 2+1 as addition is commutative over the monoid of natural numbers"

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

I would tell you a joke about UDP, but you might not get it

This is HN, I'm going to kill a joke instead:

There is the classic:

There are only two hard problems in computer science: Cache invalidation, naming things... and off-by-one errors!

Ha ha ha

I hate this joke. It takes one of the most insightful things ever said about the profession, makes it into a joke that isn't even that good, and now the only thing you rememebr about it is the punchline.

Let's break it down:

- Cache invalidation: State management! Distributed systems! This really gets to the core of what's hard. This is the only technical problem. For everything else you will have all the information you need at hand and it's a matter of getting the machine to do your bidding.

- Naming things: Communication! Dealing with people, whether it's you in the future or somebody else in the present is not a technical problem, but it is an even more important problem. It's unsolved. You will need to practice, think, fail, try more, and it's not even guaranteed to succeed. People are like that. It's a hard problem.

So there you have it. Probably the most insightful thing said about our job in less than fifteen words, and if you hear it, the "joke" immediately makes you think about the punchline, robbing you of the opportunity of reflecting about it.

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?

(Credits to whoever first came up with this.)

There are only two hard problems in distributed systems:

2. Exactly-once delivery

1. Guaranteed order of messages

2. Exactly-once delivery

Here's one I've heard, originally in Russian

===

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!

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.

MongoDB is webscale:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2F-DItXtZs

This is an old-style joke: why programmers keep confusing Christmas with Halloween? Because 25 Dec = 31 Oct.

My favorite, from /usr/share/games/fortunes:

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!"

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.

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

https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9134/jon-skeet-fact...

Why do programmers wear costumes to Christmas parties? Because DEC 25 = OCT 31.

Q: If Spider-Man and Wonder Woman founded a company, what would it be? A: Amazon Web Services

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.

A masterpiece of programming comedy: https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/wat

RT @HackerNewsOnion: California has ruled it illegal to conceal a company’s JIRA subscription for the purpose of attracting engineers.

Al Gore may not have invented the internet, but he did come up with algorithms.

Q: What's the difference between Ant and Maven?

A: The creator of Ant has apologized.

(https://twitter.com/technomancy/status/10994115673)

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."

100 bugs in the code, 100 bugs in the code, take one down patch it around, 141 bugs in the code.

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

A Markov chain trained on CS textbooks and the Bible.

https://kingjamesprogramming.tumblr.com/

It’s bigger than a joke but pretty funny: http://www.stilldrinking.org/programming-sucks

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.”

Not strictly programming, but:

An SEO consultant walks into a bar, pub, speakeasy, drinking hall, club.

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.

DevopsBorat on Twitter used to be funny (it is now replaced with spam).

But when it still was up the last joke there was along the lines of: "at work we introduced gamification, three strikes and you are out".

Why do Java developers wear glasses?... Because they don't C#

EDIT: Ah someone already did that one- what's a ghost's favorite variable type? A BOOlean

When your hammer is C++, everything begins to look like a thumb.

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.

"The plural of regex is regrets"

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.

There are 10 kinds of people in the world.

Those that understand binary and those that don't.

Paraphrasing, can't remember the exact joke:

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

"Because I want to be a señor developer"

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.

What is the collective noun for programmers?

Merge conflict.

RT @HackerNewsOnion: Developer accused of unreadable code refuses to comment.

just saw one on twitter I hadn't heard before: https://twitter.com/ctrlshifti/status/1352103674030432257

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

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

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."

"I hate you", he said.

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, ...

#ifdef GET_A_HEARING_AID

(From the Bad C Pun Contest, 1992, C/C++ User's Journal. I've never forgotten it.)

I've got an old one, not really however focused on programming.

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Back when Chuck Norris facts were popular there were Jeff Dean facts, and this one is my favorite:

Jeff Dean puts his pants on one leg at a time. But if he had more than two legs, you would see that his approach is actually O(log(n)).

Oh, and do unintentional jokes count? Because AbstractSingletonProxyFactoryBean is pretty funny. https://docs.spring.io/spring-framework/docs/3.0.6.RELEASE_t...

RT @iamdevloper: I think I’ve had milk last longer than some JavaScript frameworks.

There are only two hard problems in computer science:

2. Correct-ordering of messages

1. Exact-once delivery

2. Correct ordering of messages

This is my favourite variation of the form documented by Fowler here https://www.martinfowler.com/bliki/TwoHardThings.html

What's it like to have sex with a programmer? Nobody knows. They just sit on the edge of the bed telling you how great it's going to be.

====

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

===

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

Some people, when confronted with a problem, think "I know, I'll use regular expressions." Now they have two problems.

(quote from Jamie Zawinski)

A perfect function has zero params, a great function has one param, and a buggy function

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!”

Here is a list by hash (or crc or broken link, or )

... Everybody knows "Jesus saves."

... Someone who makes you an offer you can't understand

... It just needs a good text editor.

... Because Oct 31 = Dec 25

... All they do is sit on the bed and tell their spouses how good it's going to be.

... They haven't had any gigs yet.

... "Please excuse my friend, he's not null terminated."

... Profanity.

... At which point the genie responds, “Uh, let me see that map again.”

... None. They just declare darkness the standard.

... The programmer says "Let's just get out and get back in again."

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."

!false

It's funny because it's true.

Not precisely jokes, but the Unix Koans are both fun and insightful: https://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/unix-koans/

Why'd the programmer quit his job?

He couldn't get arrays.

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

I replied "equals FF".

How many Prolog programmers does it take to change a lightbulb?

:- False

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

I am surprised no one has posted this Stackoverflow link: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/184618/what-is-the-best-...

These are programming jokes 'in action'.

The 2 problems you can never completely eliminate in your code are the need for tests, suboptimal names, and off by one errors.

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

10 programmers decided to make a product, One asked "Where's the money?", And there were 9 of them left.

9 programmers appeared before the boss One of them did not know FoxPro, and there were 8 of them left.

8 programmers bought IBM, One said "Mac is better!" And there are 7 of them left.

7 programmers wanted to read help, One of them got bad block on the disk, and there are 6 of them left.

6 programmers tried to understand the code, One of them went crazy and there are 5 of them left.

5 programmers bought a CD-ROM, One brought a Chinese disc - there were four left.

4 programmers worked in C, One of them praised Pascal, and there were 3 of them.

3 programmers on the net played DOOM, One hesitated a little, and the score was equal to two.

2 programmers typed together: "win" One tired of waiting for the download - there was only 1 left.

1 programmer took control of everything, But he met with the user, and there were 0 of them left.

0 programmers were scolded by an angry boss, Then he fired one, and it became their FF.

1964 John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz create BASIC.

1974 Kemeny and Kurtz go to 1964.

From A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of Programming Languages.

http://james-iry.blogspot.com/2009/05/brief-incomplete-and-m...

Lots of UDP jokes, the variant I was told is:

What is the best thing about telling a UDP joke? You don't care if anyone gets it.

Why do Java programmers wear glasses? Because they don't C#.

There are only two problems in programming...

Naming things, cache eviction, and off by one errors

RT @bradneuberg: Moore’s Law giveth, JavaScript taketh away.

What's the computational complexity of an average developer workload on Linux?

O(Chrome)

"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.)

Java is a DSL that turns XML into lengthy stack traces.

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

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

Yes.

(ok, this one's actually a logic joke...)

Self-confidence, as a programmer, is when starting a new project, storing the transaction ID in an int64 rather than an int32.

Read that one a long time ago:

Each program has at least one big. Also, a program can always be shortened by a line. Therefore, every program can be shortened to a single line that doesn't work.

Also:

Why do Java programmers wear glasses?

Because they can't C# ;)

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!"

Security is "S" in IOT.

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.

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

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.

1. https://www.cs.earlham.edu/~skylar/humor/Unix/computer.folkl...

2. http://www.rinkworks.com/stupid/

3. https://www.folklore.org/

4. http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/koans.html

5. https://books.google.com/books?id=6f8VqnZaPQwC

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.

This makes me laugh.

A few usually believe I am serious.

Not really a joke but:

Most problems in computing can be solved by adding an additional layer of abstraction or indirection

...except for problems resulting from too many layers of abstraction or indirection.

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.

I have a bunch up at https://www.codepuns.com

So a programming language walks into a bar and says “hello world”

Yo mama's so fat, we had to set her column type to BLOB.

Why did the programmer swim in the crocodile river?

Warnings, but no errors.

What kind of specialist does a broken iOS app consult?

An orthoplist.

NB: my coworkers gave me a weird look when I told them this handmade nerdy joke, hope it will pull one or two smiles here

(Maybe more of a math joke)

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

Yes

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.

No one mentions this one? too old?:

Two bytes meet. The first byte asks, "Are you ill?" The second byte replies, “No, just feeling a bit off.”

This one was recently on the HN front page:

https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/users-lightbulb.en.html

HN-Thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25369929

How did the Three Wise Men find their way to baby Jesus? A Star. (This joke works better when spoken out loud instead of written)

The two hardest problems a programmer faces:

1) what to name your variables

2) cache invalidation errors

3) off-by-one errors

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".

My favorite programming joke goes something like

TCP in the streets UDP in the sheets

The Steve Yegge article: "Execution in the Kingdom of Nouns" serves basically as a Java joke story.

http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2006/03/execution-in-kingdom...

Not a joke, really, but a haiku:

It's not DNS

There's no way it's DNS

It was DNS

What's a Microsoft Product that doesn't suck?

Their vacuum cleaner!

Not exactly a programmer joke:

Airport security caught a statistician try to sneak in a bomb in his baggage. The aprehened him and question him why he has a bomb with him:

"I calculated the probability that a flight will carry two bombs on board, and it is never likely to happen, so I brought one along."

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".

The difference between God and Larry Ellison is that God doesn't thinks that he is Larry Ellison.

What did the error-correcting RAM say to the buggy Pentium chip?

BOOLSHIT!

An old one:

Q: how many Microsoft engineers does it take to change a lightbulb?

A: none they just change the standard to darkness.

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".

Knock knock

Who’s there?

long pause

Java

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.

There are two hard problems in computer science: 1. Exactly once message delivery, 2. Message ordering, 1. Exactly once message delivery.

I would like to add to this, fuck you confluent with all your lies that you sell to gullible idiots.

Why do programmers confuse Christmas and Halloween? Because OCT 31 == DEC 25

I recommend The Codeless Code, a series of humorous programming-themed Buddhist koans.

http://thecodelesscode.com/contents

Knock knock.

Who's th--

RACE CONDITION.

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.

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

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 am Devloper" on twitter is amusing: https://twitter.com/iamdevloper

https://old.reddit.com/r/programmerhumor

(Sort by top for some good ones)

    enum Bool 
    { 
        True, 
        False, 
        FileNotFound 
    };

My favourite DailyWTF. The more you think about it, the funnier it gets.

I have a UDP joke but I'm not sure you'd get it.

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

Also a more long form source of funny developer anecdotes was https://thedailywtf.com/

This is not exactly a joke, and more CS than programming related, but it's worth the read: Lower Bounds for Probably-istic Polynomial Time. http://web.archive.org/web/20080516195038/http://cs-people.b...

Who's here still remembers protoLOL? https://protolol.com/

Q: 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?

What's the difference between Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg?

One's a human trying to conquer Mars and the other is an alien trying to conquer Earth.

This is not exactly a joke, but these seem relatively on topic as humor:

Monzy - Kill Dash Nine https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fow7iUaKrq4

Googlers - Write in go https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJvEIjRBSDA

A computer programmer is found dead in the shower. Next to him there is a bottle of shampoo, with the instructions: Apply, rinse, repeat.

Some people, when confronted with a problem, think "I know, I'll use regular expressions." Now they have two problems.

Not a programming joke per se, but there the lines at https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/9134/jon-skeet-fact... are some of the funniest programming related descriptions out there.

There's nothing funny about programming!

Okay, that said... some showing my age jokes:

Q: How can you tell COBOL programmer from other programmers? A: They're the ones with the stubby fingers

Q: How is Halloween and Christmas the same? A: Because OCT 30 = DEC 25! (Octal, Decimal....groan)

but don't listen to me, go to /r/ProgrammerHumor

It's early and I haven't had enough coffee

#LordOfTheRings To enter the Doors of Durin: "Say mellon and enter"

#Vim To enter external commands: "Say :! and enter"

"There are 2 hard problems in computer science: cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-1 errors." - https://twitter.com/secretGeek/status/7269997868

Definition of Recursion:- see Recursion

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

None. The light's on in here so it must be on there too.

There are only 10 kinds of people in the world: those who understand binary and those who don't.

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."

A programmer goes grocery shopping for his wife. She tells him, "Go buy a loaf of bread and if they have eggs, bring six."

A while later he arrives home with six loaves of bread. When he sees the puzzled expression on her face he says, "Why, they did have eggs."

https://people.csail.mit.edu/gregs/ll1-discuss-archive-html/...

A classi one by Anton van Straaten that is both funny and wise.

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.

What’s the angriest part of a computer?

The cursor.

A PM and an engineer walk into a meeting room to discuss why the feature request cannot be implemented with their microservice architecture:

https://youtu.be/y8OnoxKotPQ

From Twitter:

@steveklabnik · Jan 5 if a cow changes some state, you'd call that a moo-table variable

Did you know that Javascript programmers are giving up double quote strings for Lint?

A programmer's spouse asks them to purchase some items from the supermarket:

"We've run out of milk, so buy a carton. Oh, and if they have eggs buy six of them."

The programmer dutifully heads to the shop and returns with six cartons of milk.

Why do front end engineers always have lunch alone? Because they can’t join tables.

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

(Integer joke)

—

Can you milk a bool?

False.

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.

The famous cartoon on software developement:

https://www.smart-jokes.org/how-it-projects-really-work.html

- 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...

A wife sends her programmer husband to the grocery store, saying "Get butter, and check whether they have eggs. If they do, get a dozen."

The husband comes back with 12 butters and says: "They had eggs."

AFAIK this is an original:

Who's got 10 thumbs and only tells programming jokes? this.guy

What's the jira ticket that even non-programmers are aware of? COVID-19

Once upon a time, a baby bear asked his mama to tell him a story about recursion. And so the mama bear started reading:

“Once upon a time, a baby bear asked his mama to tell him a story about recursion, the mama bear started reading:

...””

This is an old one.

What is a four-letter word name for a language that you write once and run anywhere?

Perl.

I'm a big fan of the "Ed is the standard text editor." joke

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)

Not exactly a joke, and, hysterical.

https://blog.codinghorror.com/new-programming-jargon/

It's mainly meme type stuff https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/

A friend of mine is in a band called 1023MB. They haven’t had a gig yet.

- SQL experience? + No experience. - Ok noted, NoSQL experience. + ...

What’s a python programmers favorite type of poetry? Def poetry

What’s the diff between a junior programmer and a senior programmer? s/junior/senior. Also only the junior will laugh at that joke.

Everything in https://programmerryangosling.tumblr.com/ is good for a chuckle

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.

Wife: “So, is it a boy or girl?”

Programmer: “Yes.”

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

Why did the programmer leave the restaurant?

He didn't like the table layout.

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

What did the girl function say to the boy function?

I just don't see this recursion going anywhere, we keep having the same arguments. Please don't call me anymore.

Every problem in computer science:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25866352

Don't recall the source, but it has stuck with me since my assembler days...

There are only 10 types of people in this world. Those who understand binary and those who don't.

Who is the ruler of devops?

Jenkins Khan.

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"

This is long, but i love it

https://www.famicol.in/language_checklist.html

The most geekiest joke ever:

chown -R us ./base

(probably for the old-timers among us ;))

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?

2 that make me chuckle...

If you ask a programmer, 'Do you want tea or coffee?' he will reply 'yes'.

and

q: What's Benoit B. Mandelbrot's middle name? a: Benoit B. Mandelbrot

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

(That said I really want to say something about JS, but I doubt everyone here will appreciate it ;-)

I'd tell you a UDP joke, but you might not get it.

The only thing worse than a monorepo? Two monorepos.

Two programmers decide to have a bet: "How much should we be on ? a $1000 dollars ?" "Let's round it up to $1024"

God is real, unless declared integer.

In FORTRAN, by default, any variable name that starts with I,J,K,L,M or N is an integer, otherwise it is a real type.

The programmer sets two cups on his nightstand, one full of water in case he gets thirsty, the other empty, in case he doesn't.

Syntactic sugar leads to cancer of the semicolon

How many functional programmers does it take to change a light bulb? Ans:0 Light bulbs are immutable, you need a new house.

When I am coding I often want to just shout out loud: THIS IS SHIT! But honestly, I can never remember what this refers to.

An old one, but I might as well be the first:

There are three hard problems in programming: naming, cache expiration and off-by-one errors.

I started writing one, but only finished 90%.

Then I'll happily introduce you to https://bar.com

Programmer: I'm going out for a walk.

Programmer's partner: While you're out, could you buy some milk?

And the programmer never returned.

How come God created the world in just 7 days? I wouldn't need to be compatible with the previous version.

A SQL developer walks into a bar. He walks to two tables in the back and asks, "mind if I join you?"

Two elderly women are talking. One of them admits after marrying three times, she's still a virgin.

"How is that possible?" asks her friend.

"Well, the first one was too old and couldn't do it. The second was gay and wouldn't do it".

"The third one was a computer salesman and all he did was sit on the edge of the bed telling me how great it was going to be."

(From the 70's days of the million-dollar mainframes)

I'm a little late, but here goes.

How many software engineers does it take to change a lightbulb?

(None. It's a hardware problem)

A SQL query walks into a bar and sees two tables, walks up to them and says 'Can I join you?'

A programmer walks into a bar, or not.

A C programmer and a C++ programmer walk into a bar.

A Haskell programmer describes how one would join them for a drink.

Not exactly a joke, but it could be a marketing slogan for many companies today: "AI or Die"

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

it was a fast foyer transform

https://twitter.com/caraesten/status/1284232296497770496

3 DBAs walk into a NoSQL bar. A little while later they walk out because they couldn’t find a table.

Q: How many programmers does it take to change a light bulb? A: Zero; it's a hardware problem.

There are 10 categories of people: those who know what binary system is, and those who don't.

A woman texts her husband "While you're at the store, buy eggs"

To this day he is still buying eggs.

There are only 10 types of people in the world: those who understand binary and those who don’t.

"There are 10 kinds of people : those who understand binary and those who don't"

A SQL query walks into a bar, approaches two tables and asks, "May I join you?"

There are 2 hard problems in CS:

- Cache invalidation

- Naming things

- Off-by-1 errors

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!

Software engineers doesn't believes in God...

I can't believe this one isn't here yet:

I'd tell you a UDP joke, but you might not get it.

Programming-related humor is pretty tricky. I once told a UDP joke, but nobody got it..

I know a good one, but it's a UDP joke so I don't know if you'd get it.

The two hardest things in computer science are:

0. Naming things.

1. Cache invalidation.

2. Off-by-one errors.

(just found some attribution to: Leon Bambrick)

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

A: other side. get to the To

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

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

Boy: dad, what will be "two by two equals four"? Programmer: true, my son.

When all you have is a HammerFactoryImpl, every problem looks like an INailIterator

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

Why do programmers always confuse Halloween and Christmas? Because OCT 31 = DEC 25

I decided to solve a problem with regular expressions and now I have two problems.

"To all programmers, God is real...

...unless explicitly declared to be integer..."

I was going to post a joke about UDP, but I don't know if you'd get it.

I'd tell you a buffer bloat joke, but you'd have to wait in line first.

Why do all Republicans have straight hair?

Because the curl of a conservative field is always zero.

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

My favorite one : how many devs does it take to change a bulb ?

They can’t, it’s an hardware issue

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

Teacher: What does "recursion" mean?

Student: "Aaah, verb, to curse again?"

Why do JavaScript developers stay home on Fridays? Because they have Node 8.

my fav:

The bartender says: we don't serve race conditions here A thread walks into a bar

Programmers solve tasks on their own branches due to our ancestors -- apes.

I forget where this one came from.

How did the programmer die in the shower?

'Lather, rinse, repeat'

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

Knock knock

Race condition

Who’s there?

Why programmers mistake Halloween with Christmas? Because Oct 31= Dec 25

Why was 6 afraid of base 7?

Because 10 11 12

A Haskell programmer turns coffee into code.

A coHaskell programmer turns de into ffee.

"They want a fixed price estimate" qualifies as a joke?

What transpiler would a sheep use?

Baa-bel

  # cd /etc
  # emacs hosts
  # rm * ~
  # ls
  # ls

Foo walks into a bar...

"God is real!" "Unless declared integer."

To understand recursion, we must first understand recursion.

Friend: Congratulations on the child, is it a boy or a girl?

Programmer: Yes.

  > got a light?
  zsh: no matches found: light?

My backslash escaped!

Math joke:

Always take care you don't get Descartes before Deshorse.

There are only two hard problems in computer science:

* cache invalidation

* naming things

* off by 1 errors

Why programmer gets a raise? Because he likes arrays.

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

B: No

A: Inheritance!

"What Do We Want?"

"NOW!"

"ASYNC FUNCTIONS!"

"When Do We Want It?"

How many Haskell developers does it take to change a lightbulb?

Maybe

Fortran joke: God is real, unless declared integer.

My personal favorite:

Knock knock. “Race condition.” “Who’s there?”

My favourite: "guys isn't it crazy how now we use on ehow we use 'google ' as a word now? all the time back in my day we didn't do that that's new"

You’re my number 0

An IPv6 packet walks into a bar, no one responds

Which US state should any foreign developer visit first?

Maine.

Nock nock, who's there? ... ... ... Java

How about following ?

#define true 0

#define false 1

/r/ProgrammerHumor is quite good.

I mean https://images.app.goo.gl/NHmXYwYPfN8MyiBL7

Yes, but I was too lazy to document it.

Wife told her husband: Buy two watermelons on your way home, if you see eggs, buy a dozen. So the husband went home with a dozen watermelons.

git pull: open source skeet shooting

there are 10 types of people in this world, those who understand binary and those who dont.

The two hardest things in computer science are cache invalidation, naming things, and off by one errors.

true

/* No comment */

#define private public

Good material for standup tomorrow, thank you all.

Not exactly jokes but I highly recommend looking up CommitStrip.

I think they're the only web comic dedicated to programmers (excpet of course xkcd).

Null.

SCRUM

Knock knock.

Race condition.

Who's there?

The OSI Model. Ha ha ha ha ha...

"I am a programmer"

bash.org

None

Windows ME

php

I don't have the joke, only the lame punch-line:

"Compiler? I don't even know her!"

Badum bum.