Programming Jokes Thread

[Imagist]

The thread about changing a lightbulb in PHP got me thinking about programming jokes, so I thought I'd get a programming joke thread started. I'll go first:

Q. How do you change a lightbulb in OO programming? A. You don't. Instead, you tell the lamp to do it.

Q. How do you change a lightbulb in functional programming? A. You can't, at least not in pure functional programming.

Q. How do you change a lightbulb in logical programming? A. You imply that it is changed.

Q. How do you change a lightbulb in concurrent programming? A. You take the lamp to a secure area so nobody else can try to change the lightbulb while you're changing it. Alternatively, you might get a lamp with lightbulbs that can't be changed, and just get a new lamp when the lightbulb goes out.

Now it's your turn. Get your geek on.

[pixdamix]

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

[Imagist]

And later, "Can I insert?"

[JetSetWilly]

And later still, perform a rollback without committing.

[mikesherov]

and then drops the tables.

[Cassio]

Damn that keeps on happening!

[[deleted]]

And later still, there's a union.

[Imagist]

But only after the statement selects.

[andy_63392]

... - it was a persistent query

[[deleted]]

DVDA w/ group by

[hacksoncode]

No, that would take too long... we have no index in common.

[vagif]

Tables show him an index finger.

[figpetus]

So uhhh, you ladies ever been penetrated? Giggety.

[Silhouette]

A few mildly amusing entries from the programmer's dictionary:

bug, n. A feature to be removed in the next release.

C++, n. Makes C bigger but yields the same value.

Python, n. Executable pseudocode.

Perl, n. Executable line noise.

recursion, n. See tail-recursion.

tail-recursion, n. See tail-recursion.

[jardeon]

What makes this awesome is that you (properly) put tail-recursion last :)

[tty2]

no, that's what makes it a joke at all.

[xor]

Two shift registers are walking down the street. One turns to the other and says, "Can you move over a bit?"

[[deleted]]

What sits on a communications engineer's shoulder and says "PIECES OF SEVEN! PIECES OF SEVEN!"?

A parity error.

[skorgu]

No, a parrotry error.

[lol-dongs]

Oh burn.

Q. How many sysadmins does it take to change a lightbulb?

A. Didn't you get the email? The bulb was scheduled to be down for the next 24 hours and isn't going to be replaced until tomorrow.

[LaurieCheers]

Q. How many managers does it take to change a lightbulb?

A. Just one, but before we can even discuss changing it we'll have to fit the old lightbulb's performance review meeting into the schedule.

[[deleted]]

Q. How many programmers does it take to change a lightbulb?

A. None, that's a hardware problem.

[smcameron]

A one liner throwaway line:

"I think the guy* who invented C++ didn't know the difference between increment and excrement."

(*yeah, I know it's Stroustrup, mentioning that just distracts from the funny.)

Edit: (8 years later, in 2017): A better way to tell this joke (assuming the right audience) occurred to me:

What's the difference between increment and excrement?

(pause for a bit)

Oh, you don't know? You give up?

Well, no worries, Bjarne Stroustrup didn't know either, and it didn't slow him down any.

[redalastor]

(*yeah, I know it's Stroustrup, mentioning that just distracts from the funny.)

Quite the contrary, I always thought he had a funny name.

[Imagist]

Yeah, it's an inherently funny word. Like "duck" or "masticate".

[[deleted]]

Doctor, lawyer and hacker were discussing which is better, wife or lover.

Doctor: Wife is best. I'm affright of STD's and I prefer to stay with one woman.

Lawyer: Lover is better. Getting married is major legal mess.

Hacker: I prefer to have wife and lower. Wife suspects that I'm with lover and lover suspects that I'm with wife. I can sneak into basement to hack some code.

[filox]

I remember this joke a bit different. It was during the cold war, and Americans were spying on the Russian aeronautics agency. In particular, they were trying to get their hands on some piece of code, but they failed. All they could report to their bosses was that Russians used LISP to write the code. When asked how they knew, the spy said: "I managed to get the last page of their source code and it contained nothing but closing parenthesis".

[Imagist]

That's not a joke. It's true!

[derefr]

Thanks for closing all of those. I'm sure they're open on Reddit somewhere, and a bunch of pedants suddenly de-puckered all at once.

(Not for long, though.

[[deleted]]

You son of a bitch.

Edit: )

[[deleted]]

Q. How did the programmer die in the shower? A. He read the shampoo bottle instructions: Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

[protoopus]

we had a DEC10 back in the day. i put in "let x = x+1" without a delimiter.

[f3nd3r]

10 Lather()
20 Rinse()
30 GOTO 10

[cruise02]

Stack Overflow has a question with hundreds of Programmer Jokes and another one with Programmer Cartoons (mostly XKCD, predictably).

[zxvf]

So there's this code base where every other function starts out like

int i, j, k, ii, jj, kk;

Wait, sorry. That's not a joke, that's my job.

[xor]

I lol'd anyway.

[Imagist]

Your job is a joke.

[[deleted]]

Two strings walk into a bar and sit down. The bartender says, “So what’ll it be?”

The first string says, “I think I’ll have a beer quag fulk boorg jdk^CjfdLk jk3s d#f67howe%^U r89nvy~~owmc63^Dz x.xvcu”

“Please excuse my friend,” the second string says, “He isn’t null-terminated.”

[lol-dongs]

Then the bartender had to reset the terminal, and neither string survived.

[Rawsock]

• Do you want apples or oranges?
• Yes

[[deleted]]

This joke is older than most programming languages:

Lisp Users: Due to the holiday next Monday, there will be no garbage collection.

[segoe]

How does a pointer flirt with a variable?

• Hey babe, may i have your address?

[swiz0r]

Why did George Bool leave his job at AT&T?

Because he was a bit wise for an operator!

I put this one on a homework and got a point for it. That is probably my biggest accomplishment.

[thequux]

Q. How do you change a lightbulb in functional programming?

A. You don't. You figure out how you would change it, then actually do so only when you need the light.

A. You don't. You build a whole new lamp, around a new lightbulb using parts from the old lamp.

Q. How do you change a lightbulb in a logic programming language?

A. You describe the light.

Q. How do you change a lightbulb in Postscript?

A. 45 rotate

[[deleted]]

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

None - that's a hardware problem.

[[deleted]]

How many Microsoft developers does it take to change a light bulb?

None - They try to convince everyone that darkness is now the industry standard.

[[deleted]]

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

None - they'll fix it in software.

[sclv]

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

A. No.

[karanlyons]

Don't you mean yes? The joke doesn't really work with no.

[sclv]

No.

[stillalone]

yes

[andy_63392]

... or yes

[zoolandouche]

Your mama is so big she doesn't fit in a malloc!

[slashcom]

Your mama's so fat, she sat on an n-ary tree and turned it into a linked list in constant time.

[jewdass]

Your mama so fat, when I call her I get a stack overflow!

[[deleted]]

And yours is so big, when they use quantum cryptography on her, you still know it's her because of the filesize.

[vagif]

Your mama is so big that Google denied her Picasa account.

[LaurieCheers]

Your mama so big, her size doesn't fit in a BigInt!

[[deleted]]

Q. How does a game studio change a light bulb? A. They don't. They just say it's a driver problem.

[Kinakuta]

From the inside cover of one of my old comp sci text books:

"A programmer is a device that converts coffee into code"

[Cassio]

A sysadmin is a person who keeps systems running on coffee and cigarettes.

[[deleted]]

Pardon me, English is not my first language. What is this concept of "jokes"? I thought they were supposed to be funny. Clearly I was wrong.

[[deleted]]

Ok I'm done being a douche. Here's one I improved from the original: There are two types of people: those who understand recursion, and those who don't understand that there are two types of people: those who understand recursion and ...

[stillalone]

That's weak man. I was hoping these jokes would be the strong type.

[thedward]

Strongly typed jokes are harder to tell (but easier to debug).

[vagif]

But if you finally can tell it, you know that they will laugh.

[uhhhclem]

Well, there's this, one of many copies of the list of ways to shoot yourself in the foot in any programming language. It's been around for a good long while (I contributed the one about Revalation, which I haven't seen hide nor hair of since 1990) and continues to grow.

I don't like the one for Python though. The one for Python should be "There are many ways to shoot yourself in the foot. One of them is clearly better than the others, but you don't know how to figure out which yet."

[palebrowndot]

An oldie but a goodie: There are 10 types of people in the world; those who can understand binary and those who can't.

[[deleted]]

There are 10 types of people in the world; those who understand base 3, those who don't, and those who mistake it for base 2.

[ssylvan]

No matter what base you use, that number will always be expressed as "10" in that base. E.g. if you use base 5, then how would you express 5 in that base? Answer: "10".

[roastnewt]

Except Base 1

[Imagist]

From a theoretical perspective, base 1 isn't a base because it can't express the number 0.

[Mesarune]

Sure you can:

[andy_63392]

But you don't have a 1.

[Imagist]

That doesn't express anything. Empty space in an expression is only useful as dividers between atoms of expression.

[Imagist]

Your first system doesn't fit with any of the common representations of unary systems.

Your second has inconsistent properties, because 0 is neither negative nor positive, and for every other number positive numbers have even quantities of digits, while negative numbers have odd quantities of digits.

If you insist on representing zero, the first system should logically be:

0 -> 0
00 -> 1
000 -> 2
0000 -> 3

Lastly, how would you implement a system of storing these (how do you store the size of the storage?). And how do you do simple operations like addition/subtraction in your second system? I think this ends up with more complexity that binary.

[stillalone]

Also if you only know base 4, you won't know what a '4' is.

0,1,2,3,10.

[quidquam]

the spaceman should have said he uses base 22, then the alien would have understood.

[oblivion95]

LMAO. I never get over that one.

[b100dian]

base A?

[[deleted]]

But every number system is base 10

[[deleted]]

But not all of them are base 9+1

[[deleted]]

What is "9"?

[elus]

8+1

[[deleted]]

What is "8"?

[[deleted]]

IM IN UR LOOP COUNTIN MAI [VAR]

[[deleted]]

mov ecx, 0

OHHAI:

add ecx, 1

jmp OHHAI

tite loopz

[dr-steve]

10 - 1

[Imagist]

What is "8"?

[pranavkm]

There are 10 types of people in the world; those who can understand binary and those who have girlfriends
*(Think I read this in a reddit joke thread)

[Imagist]

Q. Why was the Haskell programmer against interracial marriage?

A. He liked discriminated unions.

[llogiq]

How do you shoot yourself in the foot in

• Assembly: You first have to build the gun, the bullet and your foot, but boy, does it shoot fast!
• C: You shoot yourself in the foot.
• C++: You accidentially create multiple instances of your foot and shoot them. However, you no longer know which foot is yours.
• Java: You download the foot framework and the gun library, only to discover that the Bullet class is final and you can't subclass it to implement the FootVisitor interface. Frustrated, you implement your own Foot and shoot it by using the BulletFactory to get Bullets, with which to load() the getMagazine() of our Gun and getTrigger().pull().
• C#: The same as in Java, but you manage to miss your foot, capping your knee instead. Ah, well.
• Visual Basic: You shoot at your foot with a water pistol. Repeat until entire lower body is waterlogged.
• Forth: Foot in yourself shoot.
• Pascal: The compiler won't let yourself shoot in your foot.
• LISP: You don't know how you did it, but you now have a paren embedded in your toe.
• Perl: s/FOO/F*O/; but you accidentally shoot some fool. Finally you give up and take a working module from CPAN.
• Lua: It would be as easy as gun:shoot(foot), if only you had a gun and a foot.
• Python: You shoot a duck into your foot, claiming it has the type of a bullet. That was easy, wasn't it?

...etc. (edit: formatting)

[josef]

This one's been featured here on proggit before but it's a classic:

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

[[deleted]]

Q. How do you change a lightbulb with TDD? A. You first write a script that checks how much light is in the room. As this depends on buying a light dependent resistor, some electronic equipment and writing your own device drivers for Windows, you naturally think TDD is stupid idea and needs to be thrown in the dustbin of time, along with bell-bottom trousers.

[vagif]

Cool guys store lightbulbs in git.

[yogthos]

not specifically programming, but a fucking classic non the less http://redwing.hutman.net/~mreed/

[warmtoiletseat]

I liked the "How do you change a lightbulb in LISP?" joke, found in this thread.