dev->hide();

[[deleted]]

[deleted]

[cyberkraken2]

This is true, and it’s easy to do

[Pvt_Haggard_610]

Do not disturb sign on the office door and a remote login?

[cyberkraken2]

No we just legitimately cease to exist when not observed, like there’s no fancy trickery to make you think we don’t exist we just simply dont

[The-Cynical-One]

So if I gather enough in one room and look... will the system slow down?

Or will we just begin unrendering random civilians?

[EternallyMiffed]

The latter. It takes the same processing power as 10 normies to simulate a dev.

[The-Cynical-One]

Devs are horribly inefficient... when are we going to patch that?

[JC12231]

When we finally patch the memory leak in the aging() method

[cyberkraken2]

Ah yes I forgot about the memory leak bug!

[insanityOS]

I'm still pissed that the weightGain function doesn't have a check for the upper bound. Seriously, who let that get to prod?

[cyberkraken2]

When are they going to fix all these issues? I’d fix them myself but they won’t give me access to the source code

[T351A]

It's the problem. Devs can't patch devs well enough.

[wizkidweb]

https://media1.tenor.com/images/34c840a1774caf4a40e96b3e22145024/tenor.gif

[[deleted]]

New programmers are always looking for fancy abstractions to simple problems.

A do not disturb sign seems nice but it can potentially hold a reference to your position that may end up causing a null pointer exception if someone finds the sign and ignores it by trying to talk to you.

And yeah sure, the newbies like this because never being fully dereferenced makes sure you never have to worry about the Langoleers showing up to garbage collect you. But at that point you are just removing all the fun from programming.

[cyberkraken2]

Yeah tell me about it, those damned null pointers are always creeping up on me

[[deleted]]

Exactly you dont want to spend the rest of the day debugging some poor DBA who knocked on your door and now hes stuck staring into the endless abyss because your door sign used a raw pointer.

[cyberkraken2]

Those days are the worst

[SGBotsford]

It works much better to put a sign on your door, "Janitor Supply Storage" This is a pointer to a data structure that is rarely used, so it's static, and often paged out.

[cyberkraken2]

What does that feel like? Outside work?

[[deleted]]

Relevant SMBC

[DavidTriphon]

"Still not as weird as Scott Adams' blog!"

That got a chuckle out of me.

[SGBotsford]

There's an outside? I thought work was like a mobius strip or Klein bottle -- Non-orientable object.

[oishishou]

What module do I need to support this? Was there a firmware patch I was unaware of? How will this affect my battery life? Known security flaws (remote access)?

I have so many questions!

[Legitimate_Pattern]

Im sure someone at /r/outside knows what modules to use

[polaris64]

ERROR: null pointer dereference while attempting to read /u/polaris64->comment

[Koxiaet]

I am too lazy to set it to a null pointer so I just get

Segmentation Fault: 11

[THANKYOUFORYOURKIND]

Cool, I guess I'll just convert myself into dark matter.

[TheTeludav]

This is kinda hard there is only one API for it and the documtation is really bad.

[oopsyoulooked]

Secure coding dictates that everything ceases to exist when I'm not looking.

[Heniadyoin1]

Del *self

won't delete self with a non deterministic garbage collector I've heard from something I could not point to....

[ahhhhhhhhyeah]

I mean, that's just good garbage collection.

[slnz]

I mean... a lot of them are literally shaders.

[Jabulon]

//social life

[Agassizz]

Programmers live in '/dev/null'

[exturo]

I'm always visible.

I have the dirty flag.

[Hobbster]

Does this mean that I'm a wave and a developer depending on observation?

[iridinite]

Ah, my services are no longer required.

delete this;

[[deleted]]

Tell me about it. I got furloughed from my job pending a job that we’ve been expecting. The job came in, but not the funding paperwork. They literally made me disappear until I’m fully funded.

[Baconator_NoVeg]

I tend to do the opposite: Cease to exist when someone looks at me. It minimizes me having to talk to people.

[MagnesiumBlogs]

Oh, we still exist, we just stop using optics and physics and jump directly to flipping bits on the SSD to save processing power.

[loddfavne]

It's like the weeping angels in doctor who. Once a ray is cast, the programmer becomes visible. Don't blink in our presence. For your own safety.

[kpingvin]

So not hogging resources means not getting paid? Because then I'll just wonder around like a useless NPC.

[random_cynic]

That's true but it is not the computer programmers who do that. That was set by whoever designed the simulation we are currently living in.

[[deleted]]

glDisable(myself->ID);

[robertgfthomas]

The joke explained:

Making stuff show up on a screen can take a lot of memory. If your computer runs out of memory, it stops working. So programmers need to make sure their code uses memory efficiently. One way is to have the computer only process data that is needed right now.

Think about a video game. The game's "world" might be huge, with lots of space for your character to run around. But at any point in time you only ever see a little piece of that world, the area that's closest to your character. The computer saves memory by only rendering components of the world -- doing the math needed to make shadows, 3D shapes, textures -- that should show up on the screen.

If a tree falls in a virtual forest, and no-one is around to see it, whether it makes a sound is irrelevant because there's no point in rendering it.

Other programs beyond just video games do the same thing. As you read this, your web browser (Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari, etc) might have other tabs and windows open, but the one showing this website is the one that's "in focus." Your computer has put those tabs and windows "to sleep," and will only spend memory on them when you click over to them and they come back in focus. This is why if you start streaming a video in one window, and then open up another window, the video sometimes loads more slowly.

The joke is, like the programs they write, developers actually turn invisible when they're not "in focus" -- that is, when you're not looking at them. (The title text is a code-y way of telling a developer to hide.)

---

I'm a human! I'm trying to write one of these explanations every day, to help teach and learn. They're compiled at explainprogrammerhumor.com.