One of my all time favorites. Can’t remember where I first read it (Quora?), but it’s currently my top Google hit for “balloon programmer project manager joke”. [0]
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A man is flying in a hot air balloon and realizes he is lost. He reduces height and spots a man down below. He lowers the balloon further and shouts:
"Excuse me, can you help me? I promised my friend. I would meet him half an hour ago, but I don't know where I am."
The man below says, "Yes, you are in a hot air balloon, hovering approximately 30 feet above this field. You are between 40 and 42 degrees North latitude, and between 58 and 60 degrees West longitude."
"You must be a programmer," says the balloonist.
"I am," replies the man. "How did you know?"
"Well," says the balloonist, "everything you have told me is technically correct, but I have no idea what to make of your information, and the fact is I am still lost."
The man below says, "You must be a project manager"
"I am," replies the balloonist, "but how did you know?"
"Well," says the man, "you don't know where you are or where you are going. You have made a promise which you have no idea how to keep, and you expect me to solve your problem. The fact is you are in the exact same position you were in before we met, but now it is somehow my fault."
A helicopter was flying around above Seattle when an electrical malfunction disabled all of the aircraft's electronic navigation and communications equipment.
Due to the clouds and haze, the pilot could not determine the helicopter's position and course to fly to the airport.
The pilot saw a tall building, flew toward it, circled, drew a handwritten sign, and held it in the helicopter's window. The pilot's sign said "WHERE AM I?" in large letters.
People in the tall building quickly responded to the aircraft, drew a large sign and held it in a building window.
Their sign read: "YOU ARE IN A HELICOPTER."
The pilot smiled, waved, looked at her map, determined the course to steer to SEATAC airport, and landed safely.
After they were on the ground, one of the passengers asked the pilot how the "YOU ARE IN A HELICOPTER" sign helped determine their position.
The pilot responded "I knew that had to be the Microsoft building because, the response they gave me was technically correct, but completely useless."
A helicopter was flying around above Seattle...malfunction disabled... aircraft's electronic navigation and communications equipment...
....The pilot saw a tall building, flew toward it, circled, drew a handwritten sign, and held it in the helicopter's window. The pilot's sign said "WHERE AM I?" in large letters.
People in the tall building quickly responded to the aircraft, drew a large sign and held it in a building window.
The Sign was a stylized picture of the helicopter they were in, with a BIG red arrow pointing towards the pilot's window where a small cartoon pilot held up a sign saying 'WHERE AM I" in a hand-rendered Helvetica font.
The pilot smiled...yadda yadda yadda..
After they were on the ground, one of the passengers asked...
I have to note that this pilot is always getting into technical problems, and seems to know all the software companies in Seattle and how they are likely to respond - conclusion - the helicopter pilot is a project manager.
This joke must have been written by a journalist who's never been to Microsoft and doesn't bother to fact check their work, since the Microsoft campus is in Redmond and the tallest buildings there are only six stories high.
Project managers wouldn't read the story anyway, they cough up the headline and maybe a few lines of text and expect the team to fill in the blanks during multiple refinement meetings.
They're actually more common than engineers with understanding of project management or the concerns that they quite reasonably have. And they're way more valuable than a zug-zug eng.
I say this as a pure engineer who has been a lead many times but never a PM.
A man is flying in a hot air balloon and realizes he is lost. He reduces height and spots a man down below. He lowers the balloon further and shouts:
"Excuse me, can you help me? I promised my friend. I would meet him half an hour ago, but I don't know where I am.
The man below produces a small object the shape of a teardrop colored a pleasing grayish blue that he proceeds to hold above his head in an inverted manner and then with a courtly, elegant bow indicates the ground the bottom of the teardrop is pointing at.
The man in the balloon flies off again, exclaiming under his breath "damn designers"
As much as I like the joke and of course understand the analogy, I don't see how, from this conversation, the programmer comes to the conclusion that he has to solve the managers problem. The manager just asked, the programmer gave a technical correct answer and the manager replied that it doesn't help him. But at no point was the programmer expected to solve the managers problem nor has he blamed him so that it's "his fault".
I think it plays around a common case of a manager saving their ass in front of superiors by shouldering the blame on an unsuspicious employee (“what were you doing all these months, what’s the state of the project, and how are you planning to deliver?”). With time the latter becomes experienced enough to not take the blame, and detects these attempts easily, because it is always happen to be “their” fault.
(Sorry if that was obvious and you meant something else.)
A mathematician, a physicist and a biologist are flying in a air balloon and are lost.
They encounter a man walking below:
The biologist asks him: "do you know, where we are?"
"..." the man looks up and says nothing
The physicist ask him: "can you please tell us, where we are!"
"..." after a while the man says: "in a balloon".
The mathematician remarks, ah, he must be a philosopher.
The others: "how do you know?"
"Well, for once he needed a lot of time to answer. Then his answer is correct with our objective reality. And lastly, his answer is completely useless to us."
(in eastern soviet republics, philosophy was not in high regards, because the peoples governments were supposed to be philosophical (a la Marx) government, with in theory, very high standards)
I'm reminded of a joke I heard from a talk by the philosopher Dan Dennett:
A philosopher takes his friend to a magic show. After the usual business of vanishing a few small mammals, the magician's assistant lies in a magic box, and the magician, with a dramatic flair, begins to saw through the box.
The philosopher's friend leans over and asks What do you think is really going on? The philosopher gives it a moment's thought and replies They're using illusionist skills to give us the impression that he's sawing someone in two, but really he isn't. The philosopher's friend, unsatisfied, asks Right, but how? The philosopher shrugs dismissively, That's really not my department.
B. I hate how applicable this joke is to my life. Except I'm the friend asking, then has to figure all the shit out because all the people around me with degrees cant tell the difference between their ass and a hole in the ground.
A Soviet engineer needs some plumbing done in his apartment, and calls for a plumber. The plumber arrives, does his thing, and hands over the bill.
The engineer is shocked. -'What, this is like a quarter of what I make in a month - for half an hour's work???'
Plumber shrugs. -'Well, why don't you come join us? Easy work, well paid, no responsibility - just remember to keep mum about your degree, as we're not supposed to hire academics.'
Our engineer contemplates this for a while, applies for a job as a plumber - and gets it.
All is well, good money, no responsibilites - until management requires that they take evening school classes to gain new skills and thus better build socialism. So, grudgingly, our engineer enrolls in a math class and, upon arriving, finds that the teacher wants to establish what the plumbers already know.
-'You over there - could you please come to the blackboard and show us the formula for the area of a circle?' he asks our engineer.
Standing at the blackboard, he suddenly realizes he can't for the life of him remember the formula; while a bit rusty, he soon figures out how to reason it out - furiously writing out integrals on the blackboard, only to find the area of a circle is -(pi)*r^2.
Minus? How did a negative enter into it, he thinks, going over his calculations once again. No, still gets the same result. Sweat building, he turns away from the blackboard for a moment, turning to the other plumbers watching.
As in one voice, they all whisper -'Comrade, you must switch the limits to the integral!'
The "you learn limits in like, 9th grade" comment reminds me of this one:
Two mathematicians are in a bar. The first one says to the second that the average person knows very little about basic mathematics. The second one disagrees, and claims that most people can cope with a reasonable amount of math. The first mathematician goes off to the washroom, and in his absence the second calls over the waitress. He tells her that in a few minutes, after his friend has returned, he will call her over and ask her a question. All she has to do is answer one third x cubed.
She repeats "one thir -- dex cue"?
He repeats "one third x cubed".
She says, "one thir dex cuebd"?
Yes, that's right, he says. So she agrees, and goes off mumbling to herself, "one thir dex cuebd...".
The first guy returns and the second proposes a bet to prove his point, that most people do know something about basic math. He says he will ask the blonde waitress an integral, and the first laughingly agrees. The second man calls over the waitress and asks "what is the integral of x squared?".
The waitress says "one third x cubed" and while walking away, turns back and says over her shoulder "plus a constant!"
I've heard a variation of that were the professor is at a bar with a couple of visiting professors. He tells them, in this town pretty much everyone is smart and he proves it by asking the waitress. (The rest of the joke is the same.)
You can arrive at the same by slicing in nearly any manner you wish: vertical dx strips, horizontal dy strips, radial dtheta strips, concentric rings treated as rectangles, diagonal strips, literally anything you wish.
If you've never set up and worked a few, try the dx version and the dy version, then maybe fiddle with a few others. They all work.
The concentric rings one is trivial to work out. Integrate over r from 0 to R. Each ring at radius r has thickness dr, and has length 2 pi r, treated simply as a rectangle, which is "close enough" since each is arbitrarily thin. Then the integral is
int_0^R 2 pi r dr = 2pi r^2/2 from 0 to R = pi R^2.
A really pretty one cuts the circle into wedges, then rearranges them by alternating direction to make a "rectangle" approx r high, approx pi * r wide, with bumpy top and bottom. In the limit this has area pi * r * r, and can be shown to kids without needing calculus.
And it's not magic or circular, since pi is defined (in this case...) as the ratio of circumference to diameter.
I heard this one but it's a mathematician and a physicist in the balloon, and the physicist says the person must be a mathematician. As told by a math professor...
To me the difference in 'funniness' between a random standup special (even one that is 'good' enough to get a distribution deal) and for example some of Eddie Izzard's best is easily 1000x.
But of course my least favorite stand up special is also literally the funniest thing someone else has ever seen. So maybe it washed out in aggregate.
Which was the first comedian you named in response to the question? Was it Kevin, Sarah, or Bert?
My hypothesis is there’s a massive spread in performance in comics, in programmers, and in most fields that are substantially creative and when people argue “there is no 10x <foo>” that it’s more like because their reference frame is higher than mine.
I think maybe the programmer has forgotten to replace the mock data with a real data feed and he tells everyone who asks the same incorrect latitude and longitude no matter where they are.
I also enjoy a similar one where instead of the programmer stands a statistician and instead of project manager a principal investigator.
Source: https://stats.stackexchange.com/a/12745
Meanwhile, no effort is made on either side to make progress. It is not a joke about software programmer or project manager, it is about self-centered irresponsible people.
At a recent real-time Java conference, the participants were given an awkward question to answer:
"If you had just boarded an airliner and discovered that your team of programmers had been responsible for the flight control software, how many of you would disembark immediately?"
Among the forest of raised hands only one man sat motionless. When asked what he would do, he replied that he would be quite content to stay aboard. With his team's software, he said, the plane was unlikely to even taxi as far as the runway, let alone take off.
I know this joke, but in the version I've heard it's mechanical engineering students instead of programmers, their professors instead of conference participants, and the aircraft itself instead of the flight control software.
This is an oldie (I first heard it in the 80s) but is one of my all time favorites. While it can be told about any two classes of people it really applies to a lot of code I encounter:
A physicist is showing a thermos to her friend, a programmer.
"It's amazing", she said. "You put a cold drink inside and regardless of how hot it is outside the drink stays cold".
The programmer is suitably impressed.
"But that's not all", she continued. "You can put a *hot* drink inside and no matter how cold it is outside the drink stays hot".
Now the programmer is perplexed.
Plaintively he asks, "But how does it know?"
I think of this whenever I read code that contains a gratuitous state variable that explains the type or content of some data structure rather than make the data structure self-explaining. Even more annoying when it's a class.
Having to coordinate two variables is a recipe for bugs down the road. Seems like it should be a beginner's mistake but I see it all the time in "non beginner" code.
"An engineer, a physicist, a mathematician, and an AI researcher were asked to name the greatest invention of all time.
The engineer chose fire, which gave humanity power over matter. The physicist chose the wheel, which gave humanity the power over space. The mathematician chose the alphabet, which gave humanity power over symbols. The AI researcher chose the thermos bottle.
"Why a thermos bottle?" the others asked. "Because the thermos keeps hot liquids hot in winter and cold liquids cold in summer.", said the AI researcher. "Yes - so what?" "Think about it.", intoned the researcher reverently. "That little bottle - how does it know?"
Similar physics mystery: You're a pool of water in the bottom of a bucket, looking out at the stars. Somebody spins the bucket, making the stars spin. So you (the water) arrange your molecules in a parabolic shape, thicker at the sides of the bucket and thin in the middle.
How do you (the water know)? How do you know that the stars aren't holes in a paper sheet with light shining through? How do you know the universe isn't spinning, and you're standing still?
Love the joke, but to me it points to something else than gratuitous state variables. I think of it as "if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail", with the hammer being "procedurally solving problems".
Could you share an example of this? I could be misinterpreting this but say you're building a survey system and you need to keep track of answer types (e.g. text, date, etc) and the answer itself, how can you collapse that into one field?
Your thermos does not have a switch which you must set to "hot" or "cold" before inserting a liquid, handles solids as well as liquids, and doesn't require you to even think where the theshold might lie between the "hot" and "cold" settings. Instead it just does its best to prevent an energy exchange in either direction without having to even know the variables involved. And the "same subroutine" is basically used for different sized thermoses.
In code I see people not understand this all the time. Here's an example: let's say you present the user with their previous orders, and give them the option to filter those orders by some criterion.
The shitty way to do this is to have two variables:
So instead of just checking if a filter has been assigned, you have a separate boolean. What happens if the boolean is true but the filter is null? What would the vice versa case even mean?
The global codebase is riddled with dumb errors like this.
Even better, let's just have the default orderFilter be the equivalent of '*'.
If there's always a filter, then there's no longer a branch at the point it's used -- that needs to be tested and maintained.
I used to work with a programmer who I found difficult because their code was an ever-increasing number of "if" statements as each new case came along. Conversely he would say coding is relatively easy and that I was overcomplicating a problem by thinking about it; all I needed to do is "add an if statement here".
Yep! On of the things I point out most frequently in code reviews are things like this. However, null is an imperfect system for capturing such state. It's not self-documenting, and it breaks down when you have more than 2 states to represent.
Languages with Sum Types represent this much more elegantly with arbitrary numbers of variants and force you to check which one you have before accessing the more specific data (e.g. the filter) inside.
Our code is riddled with heavily overloaded meanings in a single value/domain, and if you have a variety of filters, you end up with this atrocity:
Foo *f1; // hey, just test for NULL
double f2; // hey, just use isnan()
int f3; // aaaaah, crap
bool f3_specified; // god why
std::string f4;
// requires heavy drugs to solve existential catastrophes
And the variety of code that has to work with either of these examples.
What happens if the boolean is true but the filter is null?
An assertion fails miserably.
What would the vice versa case even mean?
That an assertion failed miserably.
What happens if the filter is one? Minus one? Equals to PC(IP), BP? If NULL filter has to search for NULL values in a dataset? If we are looking for NAN values in a corrupted one (this one is even more tricky)?
I'm not sure they were suggesting using type-specific sentinel values (like null and nan), but to always use null or point to a value.
I like wrapping the information in a data structure exactly as you suggested, and if you never mutate the dereferenced pointer, it's equivalent to what they proposed. Big if, though.
The best is to do this generically with https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Option_type , since this pattern comes up regularly, not just with this one domain concept of "Filter"
100% agree - it's a quite common trap for inexperienced developers to write down every cases and conditions separately, when they shouldn't. As a similar example, instead of writing "req.source = host + port", people would write:
After a few quarters of services, layers, and people being added and removed, it becomes a 500-line monstrosity and sits in every critical path. And because now it's a 500-line class (half of which is defunct, but good luck figuring out which half), nobody has time to read through it and figure out that it should have been a single assignment statement.
Having the two separated gives the ability to disable/re-enable the filter without losing it. That's often very useful. In other cases you're very right.
In something like typescript you could represent this as a union type. If I'm expecting a location I could take a string ("Baghdad"), lat long pairs, an enum, etc. With a union type I can specify that it could be any of these but they fill the same purpose. In Java I'd either do method overloading or expect to receive an object that implements a method that would give the location in a common format. The wrong way to do it would be to have a function that has both a lat/long input and a string input and just say that they're nullable and we only expect to get one of them.
I think they are referring to this sort of thing (the reader will have to use their imagination and assume there is additional functionality in this class):
class ReadingMaterial:
is_magazine = False
def is_periodical():
return is_magazine
Using a base class (e.g. a Magazine and a Book class, or something) and inheritance, is much clearer than monkeying around with state.
In graphics programming the typical example of this pattern would be when someone does bespoke computations on coordinates with a bunch of if-elses instead of deriving the proper matrix equation that "just works" due to math.
Reminds me of our five value boolean we used to have: is_deleted. Woe to person who expected that to be 1 or 0. Five distinct and overloaded values were possible, though I now forget them. Probably something like pending, fully deleted, being restored, not deleted, and restored.
A doctor, an architect and a programmer talk about their professions. "Mine is the oldest", says the doctor, "as everybody knows God created Eve from the rib of Adam, and that's definitely a medical operation". "Right", says the architect, "but in fact architect is even older - it's definitely an architectural project to create the world from chaos". At this point programmer kicks back in the chair and gives friends a mysterious look. "Who, do you think, created the chaos?"
A programmer walks into a bar and ask for a drink. The bartender says I'll give you a drink if you tell me a programmer joke. And he says: a programmer walks into a bar and ask for a drink. The bartender says I'll give you a drink if you tell me a programmer joke. And he says: a programmer walks into a bar and ask for a drink. So he gives the guy a drink, so he gives the guy a drink, so he gives the guy a drink.
... (continued): The bartender gives him a puzzled look and says, "I didn't get it", to which the programmer responds "To understand recursion you must first understand recursion."
One day a student came to Moon and said: “I understand how to make a better garbage collector. We must keep a reference count of the pointers to each cons.”
Moon patiently told the student the following story:
“One day a student came to Moon and said: ‘I understand how to make a better garbage collector...
An infinite number of mathematicians walk into a bar. The first one orders a beer. The second one orders half a beer. The third one orders a fourth of a beer. The bartender stops them, pours two beers and says, “You guys should know your limits.”
Is it? In the outer "real world" the bartender will give the programmer a drink for a joke. It could be a knock-knock joke or anything, but the programmer makes it recursive. Thus making the whole thing a joke to us, otherwise it would be a knock-knock joke embedded in a pointless programmer/bartender reference.
In the first joke level, the bartender will give the programmer a drink for a joke; it doesn't work to arbitrarily end here because "a programmer asks the bartender for a drink and the bartender gives him a drink" isn't anything like a joke to qualify at the parent level.
The next level is another layer of recursion and here the programmer can literally ask for a drink and get one even though that isn't funny in itself because it can be funny in the context of the outer joke using "he asked for a drink and got one" as a cheeky way to tell a joke to get a drink, and because it's a reference to recursion, the reason for Chekhov's Programmer in the opening sentence, so making something that qualifies as a joke to get the real world programmer a real world beer.
Seems to me like it's the earliest point it could return and still potentially work, rather than an arbitrary point?
Satisfied, she declares the bar ready for business. The first customer comes in an orders a beer. They finish their drink, and then ask where the bathroom is.
I just came up with a variation to this off the top of my head.
A QA engineer walks into a bar. She orders a beer. She walks out of the bar. She walks into the bar. She walks into the bar. She walks out of the bar. She walks out of the bar. She walks out of the bar. She orders a beer.
It's very simple: you test things because we can't rely 100% on developers to create the right thing or to create it without any bugs. The same goes for automated test software. I've personally created unit tests that were failing for like 2 years but due to a bug still showed green in CI.
To go back to the joke: manual QA is infinitely more likely to find the exploding bathroom than a unit test would ;)
Automated testing is a fantastic tool, but manual QA is still very valuable.
It's not an either/or though. Used to have an assignment where we as developers would write automated tests (regression tests), while we had an experienced software tester with an excel sheet verifying things by hand. But instead of just following the sheet - which is automatable - he knew of a number of different techniques and approaches and he'd still find a lot of issues that nobody else found. For which we'd write a test to avoid it happening again.
I mean I wouldn't have minded if they wrote more automated tests themselves, but I'm also very aware that the mindset of me and developers would quickly become "it's not my responsibility to test my software".
It's weird how many bugs I regularly find in our software by actually testing things by hand, as opposed to our QA department, which does only automated testing and insists they have covered 100% use-case scenarios.
There's an old Joel on Software one related to string concatenation:
Shlemiel gets a job as a street painter, painting the dotted lines down the middle of the road. On the first day he takes a can of paint out to the road and finishes 300 yards of the road. "That's pretty good!" says his boss, "you're a fast worker!" and pays him a kopeck.
The next day Shlemiel only gets 150 yards done. "Well, that's not nearly as good as yesterday, but you're still a fast worker. 150 yards is respectable," and pays him a kopeck.
The next day Shlemiel paints 30 yards of the road. "Only 30!" shouts his boss. "That's unacceptable! On the first day you did ten times that much work! What's going on?" "I can't help it," says Shlemiel. "Every day I get farther and farther away from the paint can!"
This could be a metaphor for how a greenfield project turns into a tiresome upkeep effort, after the initial creativity gets further and further buried under the maintenance strain.
A software engineer, a priest, and a doctor are trying to enjoying a round of golf. Ahead of them is a group playing so slowly and inexpertly that in frustration the three ask the greenkeeper for an explanation. “That’s a group of blind firefighters,” they are told. “They lost their sight saving our clubhouse last year, so we let them play for free.”
The priest says, “I will say a prayer for them tonight.”
The doctor says, “Let me ask my ophthalmologist colleagues if anything can be done for them.”
And the software engineer says, “Why can’t they play at night?”
Haha, yes, that is so typical us programmers. We always know best and ofcourse there is a simple solution that fixes everything without even having to code a single line. But what if they enjoy the feeling of the sun on the skin while golfing? What if they are not completely blind but can see dark/light shades? This makes it much easier to keep balance.
This is an amalgam of two half-remembered jokes, but I think it works.
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An engineer, physicist, mathematician, and programmer are all hired by a shepherd to create a pen to hold as many sheep as possible with the materials given.
The engineer sets to work immediately building a traditional rectangular fence: a proven design which works. She finishes in an hour.
The physicist pulls out pencil and notepad, and after a few minutes of computation, determines that a novel circular fence design will enclose the maximum number of (spherical, frictionless) sheep, while remaining structurally sound. He too completes the fence within an hour.
The mathematician sits for an hour under a tree in deep thought, suddenly jumps up, wraps herself in a short length of fence, and says, "I declare myself to be outside the fence!" [this is normally where the joke ends]
The programmer meanwhile is nowhere to be found, having run off excitedly with his laptop immediately after hearing the problem statement. The shepherd congratulates the other three on a job well done, and they all part ways.
A week later, as the shepherd is tending to the flock, he is surprised to see the programmer sitting in the shade of a tree, furiously typing away at his laptop. "Uh, how's it coming?" the shepherd asks.
The programmer replies, "It's going great! I've almost finished coding the cross-platform terminal graphics library!"
It's often said that software engineers have no code of ethics. This is untrue. For example, no respectable software engineer would ever consent to writing a function called DestroyBaghdad().
Professional ethics would compel them to instead write a function DestroyCity, to which "Baghdad" could be passed as a parameter.
> Professional ethics would compel them to instead write a function DestroyCity, to which "Baghdad" could be passed as a parameter.
A common rule in the profession would be that that would only be true after they’d coded city-specific destruction functions for two previous cities, otherwise it would be premature abstraction.
Sometimes you might want to know success though. So...
status = destroyCity(&city);
This way, because assumingely we may mutate city in some way we’ll still have what comes after to examine, we didn’t pass the name or Od of the city, but the location itself. And we’ll know if overall our destruction worked. It’s also better if you code to MIRSA destruction.
A programmer is drafted by the military and ordered to write the software for a city destroying weapon. Given the freedom to choose the implementation language, he chooses Javascript. The user enters the city to be destroyed, which is passed to the Function destroyCity().
The General returns from the weapon's fist use in battle furious. "We fired your damn weapon at Bahgdad, and the city's still there! What's going on?"
"I think I know" says the programmer. Javascript passes it's parameters by value, not by reference."
Depending on the language the ampersand could mean by copy or by reference. I suspect the commentor wants by reference, since they want to examine it later.
> Depending on the language the ampersand could mean by copy or by reference
Yikes. Which languages use ampersand to signal passing by value? That's a massive footgun if I'm ever cargo-culting my way through writing some code in one of those languages for the first time.
I generally learn a new language by cargo-culting my way through a few small-ish programs. I wouldn't put anything in production in a language that I didn't adequately understand, but I could certainly waste a bunch of time debugging if I got the meaning of & flipped.
An infinite number of mathematicians walk into a bar.
The first mathematician orders a beer.
The second orders half a beer.
"I don't serve half-beers" the bartender replies.
"Excuse me?" Asks mathematician #2.
"What kind of bar serves half-beers?" The bartender remarks. "That's ridiculous."
"Oh c'mon" says mathematician #1 "do you know how hard it is to collect an infinite number of us? Just play along".
"There are very strict laws on how I can serve drinks. I couldn't serve you half a beer even if I wanted to."
"But that's not a problem" mathematician #3 chimes in "at the end of the joke you serve us a whole number of beers. You see, when you take the sum of a continuously halving function-"
"I know how limits work" interjects the bartender.
"Oh, alright then. I didn't want to assume a bartender would be familiar with such advanced mathematics".
"Are you kidding me?" The bartender replies, "you learn limits in like, 9th grade! What kind of mathematician thinks limits are advanced mathematics?"
"HE'S ON TO US" mathematician #1 screeches
Simultaneously, every mathematician opens their mouth and out pours a cloud of multicolored mosquitoes. Each mathematician is bellowing insects of a different shade.
The mosquitoes form into a singular, polychromatic swarm. "FOOLS" it booms in unison, "I WILL INFECT EVERY BEING ON THIS PATHETIC PLANET WITH MALARIA"
The bartender stands fearless against the technicolor hoard. "But wait" he inturrupts, thinking fast, "if you do that, politicians will use the catastrophe as an excuse to implement free healthcare. Think of how much that will hurt the taxpayers!"
The mosquitoes fall silent for a brief moment. "My God, you're right. We didn't think about the economy! Very well, we will not attack this dimension. FOR THE TAXPAYERS!" and with that, they vanish.
A nearby barfly stumbles over to the bartender. "How did you know that that would work?"
"It's simple really" the bartender says. "I saw that the vectors formed a gradient, and therefore must be conservative."
The "you learn limits in like, 9th grade" comment reminds me of this one:
Two mathematicians are in a bar. The first one says to the second that the average person knows very little about basic mathematics. The second one disagrees, and claims that most people can cope with a reasonable amount of math.
The first mathematician goes off to the washroom, and in his absence the second calls over the waitress. He tells her that in a few minutes, after his friend has returned, he will call her over and ask her a question. All she has to do is answer one third x cubed.
She repeats "one thir -- dex cue"?
He repeats "one third x cubed".
She says, "one thir dex cuebd"?
Yes, that's right, he says. So she agrees, and goes off mumbling to herself, "one thir dex cuebd...".
The first guy returns and the second proposes a bet to prove his point, that most people do know something about basic math. He says he will ask the blonde waitress an integral, and the first laughingly agrees. The second man calls over the waitress and asks "what is the integral of x squared?".
The waitress says "one third x cubed" and while walking away, turns back and says over her shoulder "plus a constant!"
Yeah that does push it a bit, but the joke is that she didn't understand what he was talking about with the 'onethirdxcubed', mis-parsing it without context. But when asked the integral, she knew the answer; not because she'd been told.
Or in the beginning she’s playing dumb in condescension to the man. The man is trying to prove a point he doesn’t believe. He’s treating her as if she is dumb and doesn’t know the answer, but she does know, and in the end proves she knows it by providing a more complete answer than even the man himself. (You have to assume she knows about the question as the man is telling her the answer.)
The version of the joke I'd heard doesn't include the waitress' attempt to meaninglessly memorize the answer. She simply nods when initially tutored, then later surprises both mathematicians that "an average person" knows how to properly solve an integration problem without any help.
The waitress is a high functioning autistic. She knows calculus, but cannot work out a mishearing of natural language in a noisy environment, and just memorizes the raw phonemes with meaningless word divisons.
I prefer snappier versions of the first half, like:
An infinite number of mathematicians walk into a bar. The first says, "Give me a beer." The second says, "I'll have a half a beer." The third says, "A quarter of a beer, please." The bartender pours two beers and says, "Come on, people. Know your limits."
I feel like that was the most hilarious part, and the joke could have ended there as like an anti-joke of sorts. I like how crazy it got with the "FOOLS" part. Unexpected...
Hey, it's not cool to steal jokes from /r/antiantijokes. I am a mod there (as evident from my username), and don't appreciate this. The joke is hilarious though.
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A man is flying in a hot air balloon and realizes he is lost. He reduces height and spots a man down below. He lowers the balloon further and shouts:
"Excuse me, can you help me? I promised my friend. I would meet him half an hour ago, but I don't know where I am."
The man below says, "Yes, you are in a hot air balloon, hovering approximately 30 feet above this field. You are between 40 and 42 degrees North latitude, and between 58 and 60 degrees West longitude."
"You must be a programmer," says the balloonist.
"I am," replies the man. "How did you know?"
"Well," says the balloonist, "everything you have told me is technically correct, but I have no idea what to make of your information, and the fact is I am still lost."
The man below says, "You must be a project manager"
"I am," replies the balloonist, "but how did you know?"
"Well," says the man, "you don't know where you are or where you are going. You have made a promise which you have no idea how to keep, and you expect me to solve your problem. The fact is you are in the exact same position you were in before we met, but now it is somehow my fault."
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/2rn8qx/i_h...