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Ask HN: Anyone know any funny programming jokes?

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Re: Ask HN: Anyone know any funny programming jokes?

#302

Post by haihaibye »

vulcan01 wrote: post #282
ThrustVectoring wrote: post #71

Three logisticians just finished dinner, and the waitress comes up and asks "do y'all want dessert?" The first logistician says "I don't know." The second also says "I don't know." The last says "yes, we would."

Forgive me for my ignorance, but I don't really understand this joke... Is it something to do with the first 2 not knowing the preference of the others? EDIT: never mind, this was also posted later in the thread and there's an explanation there.

Yes. If they personally didn't want it, they'd say "no". As they're uncertain about the others, they say they don't know.

Then the final person knows the others all want yes, and personally wants yes, so says yes.

It's like lazy evaluation of booleans in if statements.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone know any funny programming jokes?

#303

Post by KMag »

avmich wrote: post #166

When going to sleep, programmer puts to the table next to his bed a glass with water and an empty glass. The glass with water is in case he'll want to drink at night and the empty glass is in case he won't.

Funny, but I think even a lot of programmers won't realize it's a joke about how eliminating special cases / branches from code often makes the code look a little crazy at first glance.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone know any funny programming jokes?

#305

Post by andi999 »

Jtsummers wrote: post #267
hutzlibu wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do not get that one. US-Insider?

Al Gore was ridiculed for saying he invented the Internet (he didn't say that). The rest of the joke is playing off of that and then punning with his name.

To be fair Gore claimed he 'took the initiative in creating the internet'. His choice of words were not good I think.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone know any funny programming jokes?

#307

Post by colanderman »

This is an amalgam of two half-remembered jokes, but I think it works.

-------

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!"

Re: Ask HN: Anyone know any funny programming jokes?

#308

Post by saagarjha »

beervirus wrote: post #241
TheRealDevonMcC wrote: post #215

A programmer, an engineer, and a physicist are in adjacent hotel rooms. Each has a pitcher of water beside the bed. A fire starts in the wastepaper basket in each room. The physicist wakes up, sees the fire, estimates exactly how much water is needed to put it out, and pours exactly that amount from the pitcher, dousing the flames. The engineer wakes up, sees the fire, pours the entire pitcher of water on it, then re…

Makes more sense with a mathematician than a programmer.

The programmer looks online for documentation on how to use the water, finds it too complicated, dumps the water out the window, then dumps the contents of the wastebasket out after it. Seeing the fire gone the programmer later goes on to give a conference talk about the importance of a good throwing arm in fire safety.
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