This looks familiar... :D
What is your best programmer joke?
51–60 of 117 posts
Re: What is your best programmer joke?
#52An architect, an engineer and a programmer are discussing God:
Architect: Of course God was an architect! Look at the world! It's so beautiful and well composed!
Engineer: Nah, you don't know what you're saying! God was an engineer! Look at the universe and all it contains!
Programmer: Pfft... who do you think created chaos?
Re: What is your best programmer joke?
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why should I have to "make my case"? I'm the customer (or at least the user), right? If they don't get those mods on a leash pretty soon, someone else will come along and drink their milkshake and I won't have to do anything.
If you want to participate on the website, you should actually participate. If you do nothing, then other people are going to run the site and you won't have any input.
Why would I want to "actually participate" when 4/5 of the stuff that interests me has already been nuked by a moderator?
Re: What is your best programmer joke?
#54To go off topic a bit here - all these SO articles that are not pinpointed programming questions are always closed or locked. You can no longer ask these kind of open ended, leading to a debate kind of questions on SO anymore. The questions have to be very focused and narrow so that someone can answer it to get points. Its really disappointing but that is just the way the community took it in - pedantic.
On SO, mod points are granted by how many "points" you have. The idea is that if you have that many points, you got them by asking good questions, writing good answers, and generally being a good citizen on the site. But if you allow jokes or open-ended questions, then people get tons of points and mod powers even it they don't really contribute to the content of the site.
It would help if they allowed open-ended questions that are marked "community wiki" (which means the author doesn't get points for the post). But you'd still end up with a lot of off-topic content getting upvoted on the front page which would be annoying.
Re: What is your best programmer joke?
#55Why don't communists make good Java programmers? The class system has dissolved and the state controls everything.
Oh god! From the enterprise code I've seen, American large companies must be hotbeds of communism! And now that I think about it, enterprise systems may be fully realized soviet states. There are long queues for often meager returns, there are a large number of factories that produce mysterious junk, security policies are both incomprehensible and harsh, and to get anything done, you have to know somebody.
This is pretty accurate, actually, and has been studied by economists, for whom this was a huge problem: If the free market is supposed to be so great, then why are firms not organized as markets internally? In fact, why do they exist in the first place? In a sense, the existence of firms is evidence that a free market is not the best organizing principle for everything.
You may want to start here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_the_firm
Re: What is your best programmer joke?
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
I get incredible value out of Stack Overflow. Do you not? Does the fact that this question is locked diminish its value or the value of Stack Overflow in any way? Of course, Stack Overflow is not made for interesting questions. Notice that I am not defending this descision, I am merely stating it. You know this, which is why you were accurately able to predict that this question would be closed. Why is this interesti…
At least 4/5 of the times it comes up in a Google search (for the stuff I search for, at least), some idiot moderator has closed the question. The message that sends to me is "Your question isn't worthy of our site. Go away." So, yeah, it does make using the site less pleasant, and thus reduces its value to me.
Ditto. I stopped contributing to Stack Overflow because of this.
It's a classic example of cart-before-the-horse product thinking. Users aren't there to follow your orders; they're people with actual needs that you're trying to serve. I get that they don't want the site to be overrun with goofy content, because that prevents you from serving other actual needs. But there are better solutions than tasking a large number of people with running around and jerkily stomping out anything that doesn't fit the owners' precise vision.
I think this is the exact mistake that Friendster made. And really, the same one Google Plus made. Neither of those products were built for the users; they were built to serve the owners' desires.
Re: What is your best programmer joke?
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
Huh. I was pretty sure this was one question everyone could understand was off-topic, but I guess I was wrong. Interestingly, this HN submission is illustrating the original reason Jeff Atwood locked the post in 2009 - nobody can be bothered to even read the first page before posting their own joke.
Of the 20+ pages already there, no one has yet posted the funny one from xkcd or Dilbert. No other site on the Internet can put these two sources together like Stack Overflow can.
There's another whole thread devoted to cartoons: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/84556/whats-your-favorite...
Yes, it's locked too, and it too was deleted for a year or so before the current crop of moderators undeleted and locked it.
Re: What is your best programmer joke?
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
Oh god! From the enterprise code I've seen, American large companies must be hotbeds of communism! And now that I think about it, enterprise systems may be fully realized soviet states. There are long queues for often meager returns, there are a large number of factories that produce mysterious junk, security policies are both incomprehensible and harsh, and to get anything done, you have to know somebody.
This is pretty accurate, actually, and has been studied by economists, for whom this was a huge problem: If the free market is supposed to be so great, then why are firms not organized as markets internally? In fact, why do they exist in the first place? In a sense, the existence of firms is evidence that a free market is not the best organizing principle for everything. You may want to start here: http://en.wikipedi…
My personal theory is that this is mainly about the primate dominance dynamic. Markets really do work better, but too many people would rather be the alpha monkey to care about little things like organizational effectiveness.
Of course, to bring this back on topic, as a software guy I'm inclined to think it's a hardware problem.
Re: What is your best programmer joke?
#59An mechanical engineer, physicist, and computer programmer are in a car driving down a steep mountain when the brakes fail. The careens around bends picking up speed until they finally reach the bottom and the car rolls to a stop.
The engineer hops out of the car and begins inspecting the brakes for the source of the failure. The physicist grabs a pad of paper and starts calculating the maximum angular momentum and friction coefficients.
The computer programmer looks at the car, then at the mountain and says, "let's push it up to the top and see if it happens again."
Re: What is your best programmer joke?
#60My favorite was originally about the DEC minicomputer Field Services organization, known as "field circuses":
Q: How can you recognize a field circus engineer
with a flat tire?
A: He's changing one tire at a time to see which one
is flat.
Q: How can you recognize a field circus engineer
who is out of gas?
A: He's changing one tire at a time to see which one
is flat.
Q: How can you tell it's *your* field circus engineer?
A: The spare is flat, too. [1]
[1] The Jargon File is full of little gems like this. http://zvon.org/comp/r/ref-Jargon_file.html#Terms~field_circ...