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Per your downvotes - I used to hate jokes on Hacker News and downvote them when I saw them, but I've become more ambivalent. They're a way of amicably sharing culture and experiences with other engineers that transcend any differences in age, gender, race, background, etc.

The formulation of this joke I tend to see is,

The two hardest problems in programming:

(1) cache invalidation

(2) appropriately naming things

(3) off-by-one errors




It's barely even a joke to me anymore -- it's just too real for me to laugh.

(Cache invalidation is essentially the same problem as managing mutable state -- "Out of the Tar Pit" frames mutable state as either essential or incidental, the latter being rederivable in principle from essential state. Incidental mutable state is no more and no less than a cache, and usually one with an informal and undocumented invalidation policy.)

(And naming things has a very real technical counterpart in addressing, which comes up obviously in networking, but you can also see its shadows in quite a lot of concerns around architecture and modularity.)


Humor is often the most efficient way to communicate/accept the truth.


To make the truth seem like an acceptable parallel universe, and then join it.


The two hardest problems in programming:

(1) cache invalidation

(3) off-by-one errors

(2) appropriately naming things

(4) parallel execution [leading to race conditions / ordering bugs]


I think you win a bad in-joke award - the first annual Turing-Dad joke award.


Minor quibble, it should be the three hardest problems.


It should be, but the increments were run in parallel on nonvolatile memory.


The two hardest problems in computer science are:

1) Naming 3) Cache Invalidation 2) Off-by-one errors 3) In-order once-only delivery of distributed messages

And an almost fanatical devotion to the Pope


I love it told like this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26406351

1) naming

4) concurr2) cache invalidation

ency

3) off-by-one errors


(5) feature creep




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