
What is your best programmer joke? - gregchapple
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/234075/what-is-your-best-programmer-joke
======
JonnieCache
_A TCP packet walks into a bar, and says to the barman "Hello, I'd like a
beer."

The barman replies "Hello, you'd like a beer?"

"Yes," replies the TCP packet, "I'd like a beer."_

I'd tell you my UDP packet joke, but I'm not sure you'd get it.

~~~
TacticalCoder
"We don't allow faster-than-light neutrinos in here, says the bartender.

A neutrino walks into a bar."

(read on /. years ago IIRC)

------
edw519
On the way to a sales call, a salesman, a project manager, and a programmer
were kidnapped. When their employer refused to pay the ransom, the kidnappers
granted each a last wish before killing them. The salesman said, "I still want
to make the pitch I prepared for today. It's awesome and will only take an
hour." The project manager said, "I still want to present my Powerpoint for
this project. It's only 92 slides." The programmer said, "Kill me first."

------
ojbyrne
I often use "There are 2 hard problems in computer science: cache
invalidation, naming things, and off-by-1 errors."

~~~
thedufer
I prefer "There are 3 hard problems in computer science: cache invalidation
and naming things."

~~~
r00fus
My favorite on this vein is: "There are 10 types of people in the world: those
who understand binary and those who don't."

~~~
elwell
I like this variation:

    
    
      There are 10 type of people in the world:
      Those who understand binary
      Those who don't
      And those who count from zero

~~~
athaeryn
Or:

There are 10 types of people in the world: those who understand binary, those
who don't, and those who didn't expect this joke to be in base three.

------
crntaylor
I know an accounting joke:

 _An engineer and an accountant are on a train when they pass between two
fields of sheep._

 _" Boy, there are a lot of sheep in those fields." says the engineer._

 _" There are 1,005" says the accountant._

 _" How do you know?"_

 _" Well, there are about 1,000 in that field, and there are 5 in the other
one."_

~~~
gjm11
The thing about this joke is that the accountant is (kinda) right. Suppose
they pass one field with about 1000 sheep and lots and lots of fields with ~5
sheep. Someone who thinks "about 1000" \+ 5 = "about 1000" is going to get a
very wrong answer, and someone who thinks "about 1000" \+ 5 = "about 1005" is
going to do much better.

This is also why, when combining floating-point values of different widths, it
is better to say single + double -> double than single + double -> single, and
why the concept of "significant figures" as commonly taught in schools is
dangerous.

------
wpietri
My favorite was originally about the DEC minicomputer Field Services
organization, known as "field circuses":

    
    
      Q: How can you recognize a field circus engineer
         with a flat tire?
      A: He's changing one tire at a time to see which one
         is flat.
    
      Q: How can you recognize a field circus engineer
         who is out of gas?
      A: He's changing one tire at a time to see which one
         is flat.
    
      Q: How can you tell it's *your* field circus engineer?
      A: The spare is flat, too. [1]
    
    

That particular organization may be long gone, but you can definitely spot the
behavior. E.g., when calling front-line tech support and being asked to reboot
and reinstall things that clearly don't matter.

[1] The Jargon File is full of little gems like this.
[http://zvon.org/comp/r/ref-
Jargon_file.html#Terms~field_circ...](http://zvon.org/comp/r/ref-
Jargon_file.html#Terms~field_circus)

------
phurley
An mechanical engineer, physicist, and computer programmer are in a car
driving down a steep mountain when the brakes fail. The careens around bends
picking up speed until they finally reach the bottom and the car rolls to a
stop.

The engineer hops out of the car and begins inspecting the brakes for the
source of the failure. The physicist grabs a pad of paper and starts
calculating the maximum angular momentum and friction coefficients.

The computer programmer looks at the car, then at the mountain and says,
"let's push it up to the top and see if it happens again."

------
tjr
Some programmers prefer to intermingle functional code with imperative code,
while others do not: they believe in the separation of Church and state.

------
quarterto
Why don't communists make good Java programmers?

The class system has dissolved and the state controls everything.

~~~
wpietri
Oh god! From the enterprise code I've seen, American large companies must be
hotbeds of communism!

And now that I think about it, enterprise systems may be fully realized soviet
states. There are long queues for often meager returns, there are a large
number of factories that produce mysterious junk, security policies are both
incomprehensible and harsh, and to get anything done, you have to know
somebody.

~~~
nhaehnle
This is pretty accurate, actually, and has been studied by economists, for
whom this was a huge problem: If the free market is supposed to be so great,
then why are firms not organized as markets internally? In fact, why do they
exist in the first place? In a sense, the existence of firms is evidence that
a free market is not the best organizing principle for everything.

You may want to start here:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_the_firm](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_the_firm)

~~~
wpietri
My personal theory is that this is mainly about the primate dominance dynamic.
Markets really do work better, but too many people would rather be the alpha
monkey to care about little things like organizational effectiveness.

Of course, to bring this back on topic, as a software guy I'm inclined to
think it's a hardware problem.

------
mck-
How long does it take for a dyslexic programmer to get this joke?

Logn time

------
program
This article from devhumor:
[http://devhumor.com/193/](http://devhumor.com/193/)

The assembly panel is very funny.

------
edw519

      >If you're happy and you know it, missing quote
      missing quote
      
      >IfYoureHappyAndYouKnowItNotAVerb
      Not a verb
    
      >If you're happy and you know it, then your face will surely show it, If you're happy and you know it, syntax error
      syntax error

------
Millennium
At a place where I used to work, someone had a car with one of those Virginia
"Internet C@pital" license plates. The design has changed over the years, but
this one put the @ in a big blue dot right in the lower center of the license
plate. Sadly, I can't find a pic of this person's plate, or even that style of
plate, anymore.

The license number was "CAR JPG".

I SO wish I had a pic to prove this.

~~~
DjangoReinhardt
Not sure if this is the one you are talking about, but a cursory image search
on Google led me to this image in a Flickr set:
[http://www.flickr.com/photos/mrbee2828/92718344/](http://www.flickr.com/photos/mrbee2828/92718344/)

I don't see the '@' anywhere which leads me to believe this may be a
fake/photoshop. Still, quite interesting... :)

~~~
ojbyrne
[http://domainnamewire.com/wp-content/virginia-internet-
capit...](http://domainnamewire.com/wp-content/virginia-internet-capital.png)

In your picture it would be covered by the license plate frame.

~~~
Millennium
That's not the design I remember -like I said, it has changed- but it does
look like a similar vehicle. Maybe they got a new license plate?

------
adnam
Before I click, just a quick bet with myself this excellent question has been
closed.

[edit] yep, locked. Thanks NullUserException! Now another quick bet with
myself that someone will reply to this comment defending S.O.s repeated
closure of interesting questions.

~~~
libria
Looks like I already won my bet that someone on HN was going to bitch and moan
about closed questions again.

Surely you can make a good case for it on meta.stackoverflow.com?

~~~
m_myers
Huh. I was pretty sure this was one question everyone could understand was
off-topic, but I guess I was wrong.

Interestingly, this HN submission is illustrating the original reason Jeff
Atwood locked the post in 2009 - nobody can be bothered to even read the first
page before posting their own joke.

~~~
insteadof
Of the 20+ pages already there, no one has yet posted the funny one from xkcd
or Dilbert. No other site on the Internet can put these two sources together
like Stack Overflow can.

~~~
m_myers
There's another whole thread devoted to cartoons:
[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/84556/whats-your-
favorite...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/84556/whats-your-favorite-
programmer-cartoon)

Yes, it's locked too, and it too was deleted for a year or so before the
current crop of moderators undeleted and locked it.

------
NAFV_P
At the top of the page:

 _When I teach introductory computer science courses, I like to lighten the
mood with some humor. Having a sense of fun about the material makes it less
frustrating and more memorable, and it 's even motivating if the joke requires
some technical understanding to 'get it'!_

When put in this context, I think the question has some value. Being honest,
programming can be very dry at times. The most mirth inducing stuff I have
read in relation to programming is when programmers complain about programming
languages, I think SO had a question addressing this issue.

------
dserban
An electrical engineer from GE, a chemical engineer from DuPont and a Windows
kernel developer from Microsoft are in a car, driving along a desert road.

At some point the car malfunctions and comes to a stop. The following
discussion ensues:

GE guy: "It's because there are some crossed wires in the electrical system
that regulates the engine."

DuPont Guy: "Don't be ridiculous, this is clearly caused by a wrong mix of
gasoline and oxygen going into the cylinders."

MS guy: "Why don't we all get out of the car, close the doors, reopen the
doors, get back into the car, and try again."

~~~
mindcrime
The variation I like is this:

An electrical engineer, a mechanical engineer and a software engineer from
Microsoft are riding in a car, when they start down a steep hill. Halfway down
the brakes go out and the car crashes into a tree at the bottom of the hill.
Luckily, no one is hurt, so they get out and start analyzing what happened.

Electrical engineer: Clearly a short-circuit in the ABS system caused the
brakes to go out.

Mechanical engineer: No, no, it was an over-pressure situation that caused a
brake line to rupture.

They both turn to the Microsoft guy and ask him for his opinion:

Microsoft guy: I don't know, but let's push the car back to the top of the
hill and try it again.

------
Malus
Two regular expressions are sitting at a bar and having a drink. A big,
context-sensitive string walks over and steals the drink from the first regex.
The second says to the first "Are you going to let him bully you like that?"
The first replies "Yeah, I'm no match for him."

------
Flow
Sticker on car: "My other car is a cdr".

~~~
qbrass
He cdr got a cadr. A cadr is a real car.

------
BerislavLopac
Why programmers keep confusing Halloween and Christmas?

Because Oct 31 == Dec 25.

------
pmelendez
>"locked by NullUserException"

I was hoping that were a joke :(

------
yalogin
To go off topic a bit here - all these SO articles that are not pinpointed
programming questions are always closed or locked. You can no longer ask these
kind of open ended, leading to a debate kind of questions on SO anymore. The
questions have to be very focused and narrow so that someone can answer it to
get points. Its really disappointing but that is just the way the community
took it in - pedantic.

~~~
sp332
On SO, mod points are granted by how many "points" you have. The idea is that
if you have that many points, you got them by asking good questions, writing
good answers, and generally being a good citizen on the site. But if you allow
jokes or open-ended questions, then people get tons of points and mod powers
even it they don't really contribute to the content of the site.

It would help if they allowed open-ended questions that are marked "community
wiki" (which means the author doesn't get points for the post). But you'd
still end up with a lot of off-topic content getting upvoted on the front page
which would be annoying.

~~~
teh_klev
"It would help if they allowed open-ended questions that are marked "community
wiki""

And then we'd have quora, which would not be Stack Overflow. The intention of
the site from day one was to encourage specific answerable programming
questions that do not involve endless open ended discussion.

I truly believe this narrow scope of acceptable question type is why the site
is hugely popular.

I don't understand how people don't get this even after five and a half years.

------
crusso
I have a UDP joke, but you might not get it.

~~~
ColinWright
Yes - see the earlier comment:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7036510](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7036510)

~~~
crusso
Redundancy is a key part of unreliable protocol jokes.

~~~
centrinoblue
lol

------
fjcaetano
An architect, an engineer and a programmer are discussing God:

Architect: Of course God was an architect! Look at the world! It's so
beautiful and well composed!

Engineer: Nah, you don't know what you're saying! God was an engineer! Look at
the universe and all it contains!

Programmer: Pfft... who do you think created chaos?

------
cema
Strange that the joke most popular with my friends has not been quoted yet.
It's about the programmer who goes to bed and places two glasses by the
bedside: one with water, in case he wants to drink at night, and the other
empty, in case he does not.

------
stompchicken
Why couldn't the computer scientist plough the field? It was intractorable.

------
redmattred
A couple originals:

\- Javascript programmers have no class.

\- Psst...did you hear Haskell is stateless? Pass it on.

------
ww520
There are three kinds of people in the world: the ones who understand binary
and the ones who don't.

~~~
ColinWright
That's a weird non-joke version. The ones I know are:

The usual:

    
    
        There are 10 kinds of people in the world, those
            that understand binary and those that don't.
    

Then there was:

    
    
        There are 11 kinds of people in the world, those
            that understand binary and those that don't.
    

Which is a riff on:

    
    
        There are 3 kinds of people in the world, those
            who can count, and those who can't.
    

Then along came:

    
    
        There are 10 kinds of people in the world, those
            that understand binary, those that don't, and
            those that didn't expect this joke to be in
            ternary.
    

Yours, on the other hand, just doesn't really make sense. Maybe I'm missing
something ...

~~~
mirkules
Maybe he's a SQL programmer (a binary column can be true, false or NULL).

------
ctdonath
At a friend's wedding, I delivered the toast which was a long list of "To X!"
items, where X was something special to/for/about the couple. This worked
spectacularly well. Including the dead silence & puzzled looks, and seething
consternation from the groom, at "To RTFM!" halfway thru.

~~~
cema
Oh btw, did you have a toast "to X" too, or just "to ${X}"?

------
elliottkember
Why did the Java developer need glasses?

Because he couldn't C#.

------
DyslexicAtheist
Study shows learning exotic functional programming languages like LISP/Scheme
or Haskell to impact facial hair growth and accelerate neckbeards:
[http://thequickword.wordpress.com/2014/01/23/on-the-
origin-o...](http://thequickword.wordpress.com/2014/01/23/on-the-origin-of-
the-modern-neckbeard-hacker/)

------
conradfr
PHP

------
AnimalMuppet
#ifdef GetAHearingAid

Stolen from the Bad C Pun Contest in the C/C++ User's Journal, in 1992. But
I've never forgotten it.

------
magikarp
A Chinese spy manages to steal the last 50MB of the Lisp program governing
U.S. missile launches. Fortunately, it was all closing parentheses.

~~~
pavelludiq
actually, it was javascript and the file contained:

    
    
                  }
              });
          };
      }());

~~~
cema
Well, people do say Javascript is a Lisp in C clothes, and for a good reason.
Well, for a bad reason too, as in this case.

~~~
jeremiep
I used to say that too until I read
[http://journal.stuffwithstuff.com/2013/07/18/javascript-
isnt...](http://journal.stuffwithstuff.com/2013/07/18/javascript-isnt-scheme/)

~~~
cema
It is not, but there are reasons some people say that. Keep in mind this is a
posting about jokes. By the way, someone managed to downvote the parent --
what a strange reaction to a joke! Kind of sad, really.

------
elwell
Pair-programming:
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8qgehH3kEQ](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8qgehH3kEQ)

------
elwell

      There are 10 types of people in the world:
      Those who understand binary,
      Those who don't,
      And those who count from zero.

------
nealabq
An http request walks into a bar and says "get me a beer". The barman sets
down a beer with 200 napkins.

------
Pxtl
This one I sing to my kids:

"Old MacDonald had a farm,

E-I-E-I-O

And on that farm he had an infinite recursion

E-I-E-I-O

With an

Old MacDonald had a farm,

E-I-E-I-O

And on that farm he had an infinite recursion ..."

~~~
rismay
an infinite loop _

~~~
redblacktree
I think he went with recursion so that it would eventually terminate, when he
runs out of memory.

~~~
Pxtl
it loops when you get to "With An", not that you get through the whole verse.

That is, the cow says "Moo", the sheep says "baa", and the infinite recursion
says "That is, the cow says "Moo", the sheep says "baa", and the infinite
recursion says "That is, the cow says "Moo", the sheep says "baa", and the
infinite recursion says "That is, the cow says "Moo", the sheep says "baa",
and the infinite recursion says "That is, the cow says "Moo", the sheep says
"baa", and the infinite recursion says StackOverflowException was unhandled

An unhandled exception of type

'System.StackOverflowException' occurred in Pxtl.dll

Make sure you do not have an infinite loop or infinite recursion.

------
eXpl0it3r
This looks familiar... :D

------
Killah911
Every little bit counts

------
Vitaly
Knock, nock.

Race condition.

Who is there?

------
thenerdfiles
_Two bits walk into a bar for a byte._

~~~
thenerdfiles
_Two bytes walk into a bar for a bit._

