http://stackoverflow.com/questions/234075/what-is-your-best-programmer-joke
When I teach introductory
computer science courses, I like to lighten the mood with some humor.
Having a sense of fun about the material makes it less frustrating and
more memorable, and it's even motivating if the joke requires some
technical understanding to 'get it'!
I'll start off with a couple of my favorites:
Q: How do you tell an introverted computer scientist from an extroverted computer scientist?
A: An extroverted computer scientist looks at your shoes when he talks to you.
And the classic:
Q: Why do programmers always mix up Halloween and Christmas?
A: Because Oct 31 == Dec 25!
I'm always looking for more of these, and I can't think of a better
group of people to ask. What are your best programmer/computer
science/programming jokes?
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A man flying in a hot air balloon suddenly
realizes he’s lost. He reduces height and spots a man down below. He
lowers the balloon further and shouts to get directions, "Excuse me,
can you tell me where I am?"
The man below says: "Yes, you're in a hot air balloon, hovering 30 feet above this field."
"You must work in Information Technology," says the balloonist.
"I do" replies the man. "How did you know?"
"Well," says the balloonist, "everything you have told me is technically correct, but It's of no use to anyone."
The man below replies, "You must work in management."
"I do" replies the balloonist, "But how'd you know?"
"Well", says the man, "you don’t know where you are, or where you’re
going, you expect me to be able to help. You’re in the same position
you were before we met, but now it’s my fault."
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“Knock, knock.”
“Who’s there?”
very long pause….
“Java.”
:-o
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An SQL query goes into a bar, walks up to two tables and asks, "Can I join you?"
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Q: how many programmers does it take to change a light bulb?
A: none, that's a hardware problem
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A young Programmer and his Project Manager
board a train headed through
the mountains on its way to Wichita. They can find no place to sit
except for two seats right across the aisle from a young woman and her
grandmother. After a while, it is obvious that the young woman and the
young programmer are interested in each other, because they are giving
each other looks. Soon the train passes into a tunnel and it is pitch
black. There is a sound of a kiss followed by the sound of a slap.
When the train emerges from the tunnel, the four sit there without
saying a word. The grandmother is thinking to herself, “It was very
brash for that young man to kiss my granddaughter, but I’m glad she
slapped him.”
The Project manager is sitting there thinking, “I didn’t know the
young tech was brave enough to kiss the girl, but I sure wish she
hadn’t missed him when she slapped me!”
The young woman was sitting and thinking, “I’m glad the guy kissed me, but I wish my grandmother had not slapped him!”
The young programmer sat there with a satisfied smile on his face.
He thought to himself, “Life is good. How often does a guy have the
chance to kiss a beautiful girl and slap his Project manager all at the
same time!”
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A physicist, an engineer and a programmer
were in a car driving over a steep alpine pass when the brakes failed.
The car was getting faster and faster, they were struggling to get
round the corners and once or twice only the feeble crash barrier saved
them from crashing down the side of the mountain. They were sure they
were all going to die, when suddenly they spotted an escape lane. They
pulled into the escape lane, and came safely to a halt.
The physicist said "We need to model the friction in the brake pads
and the resultant temperature rise, see if we can work out why they
failed".
The engineer said "I think I've got a few spanners in the back. I'll take a look and see if I can work out what's wrong".
The programmer said "Why don't we get going again and see if it's reproducible?"
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A computer science student is studying under
a tree and another pulls up on a flashy new bike. The first student
asks, “Where’d you get that?”
The student on the bike replies, “While I was studying outside, a
beautiful girl pulled up on her bike. She took off all her clothes and
said, ‘You can have anything you want’.”
The first student responds, “Good choice! Her clothes probably wouldn’t have fit you.”
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Programming is like sex:
One mistake and you have to support it for the rest of your life.
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Q: "Whats the object-oriented way to become wealthy?"
A: Inheritance
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"To understand what recursion is you must first understand recursion"
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A Cobol programmer made so much money doing
Y2K remediation that he was able to have himself cryogenically frozen
when he died. One day in the future, he was unexpectedly resurrected.
When he asked why he was unfrozen, he was told:
"It's the year 9999 - and you know Cobol"
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A guy is standing on the corner of the street smoking one cigarette after another. A lady walking by notices him and says
"Hey, don't you know that those things can kill you? I mean, didn't you see the giant warning on the box?!"
"That's OK" says the guy, puffing casually "I'm a computer programmer"
"So? What's that got to do with anything?"
"We don't care about warnings. We only care about errors."
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Jesus and Satan have an argument as to who is
the better programmer. This goes on for a few hours until they come to
an agreement to hold a contest with God as the judge. They set
themselves before their computers and begin. They type furiously, lines
of code streaming up the screen, for several hours straight.
Seconds before the end of the competition, a bolt of lightning
strikes, taking out the electricity. Moments later, the power is
restored, and God announces that the contest is over. He asks Satan to
show his work. Visibly upset, Satan cries and says, “I have nothing. I
lost it all when the power went out.”
“Very well,” says God, “let us see if Jesus has fared any better.”
Jesus presses a key, and the screen comes to life in vivid display, the voices of an angelic choir pour forth from the speakers.
Satan is astonished. He stutters, “B-b-but how?! I lost everything, yet Jesus’ program is intact! How did he do it?”
God chuckles, “Everybody knows… Jesus saves.”
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There are 10 types of people in the world. Those who understand binary and those who have regular sex.
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I called the janitor the other day to see what he could do about my dingy
linoleum floor. He said he would have been happy to loan me a polisher, but
that he hadn't the slightest idea what he had done with it. I told him not to
worry about it - that as a programmer it wasn't the first time I had
experienced a buffer allocation failure due to a memory error.
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A group of ten top software engineers is sent to a class for aspiring managers. The teacher walks in and asks this question:
"You work for a software company which develops avionics (software
that controls the instruments of an airplane). One day you are taking a
business trip. As you get on the plane you see a plaque that says this
plane is using a beta of the software your team developed. Who would
get off?"
Nine developers raised their hands. The teacher looked at the tenth and asked, "Why would you stay on?"
The tenth said, "if my team wrote the software, the plane would not get off the ground, much less crash."
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These 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."
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How to catch a Elephant in the Africa
- MATHEMATICIANS hunt elephants by
going to Africa, throwing out
everything that is not an elephant,
and catching one of whatever is
left.
- EXPERIENCED MATHEMATICIANS
will attempt to prove the existence
of at least one unique elephant
before proceeding to step 1 as a
subordinate exercise.
- PROFESSORS OF MATHEMATICS will prove the existence of at least one
unique elephant and then leave the detection and capture of an actual
elephant as an exercise for their graduate students.
- COMPUTER SCIENTISTS hunt elephants by exercising Algorithm A:
- Go to Africa.
- Start at the Cape of Good Hope.
- Work northward in an orderly manner, traversing the continent alternately east and west.
- During each traverse pass,
- Catch each animal seen.
- Compare each animal caught to a known elephant.
- Stop when a match is detected.
- EXPERIENCED COMPUTER PROGRAMMERS modify Algorithm A by placing a
known elephant in Cairo to ensure that the algorithm will terminate.
- ASSEMBLY LANGUAGE PROGRAMMERS prefer to execute Algorithm A on their hands and knees.
- ENGINEERS hunt elephants by going to Africa, catching gray animals
at random, and stopping when any one of them weighs within plus or
minus 15 percent of any previously observed elephant.
- ECONOMISTS don't hunt elephants, but they believe that if elephants are paid enough, they will hunt themselves.
- STATISTICIANS hunt the first animal they see N times and call it an elephant.
- CONSULTANTS don't hunt elephants, and many have never hunted
anything at all, but they can be hired by the hour to advise those
people who do.
- OPERATIONS RESEARCH CONSULTANTS can also measure the correlation of
hat size and bullet color to the efficiency of elephant-hunting
strategies, if someone else will only identify the elephants.
- POLITICIANS don't hunt elephants, but they will share the elephants you catch with the people who voted for them.
- LAWYERS don't hunt elephants, but they do follow the herds around arguing about who owns the droppings.
- SOFTWARE LAWYERS will claim that they own an entire herd based on the look and feel of one dropping.
- VICE PRESIDENTS OF ENGINEERING, RESEARCH, AND DEVELOPMENT try hard
to hunt elephants, but their staffs are designed to prevent it. When
the vice president does get to hunt elephants, the staff will try to
ensure that all possible elephants are completely prehunted before the
vice president sees them. If the vice president does happen to see a
elephant, the staff will:
- compliment the vice president's keen eyesight and
- enlarge itself to prevent any recurrence.
- SENIOR MANAGERS set broad elephant-hunting policy based on the
assumption that elephants are just like field mice, but with deeper
voices.
- QUALITY ASSURANCE INSPECTORS ignore the elephants and look for mistakes the other hunters made when they were packing the jeep.
- SALES PEOPLE don't hunt elephants but spend their time selling
elephants they haven't caught, for delivery two days before the season
opens.
- SOFTWARE SALES PEOPLE ship the first thing they catch and write up an invoice for an elephant.
- HARDWARE SALES PEOPLE catch rabbits, paint them gray, and sell them as desktop elephants.
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Once upon a time there was a shepherd looking
after his sheep on the side of a deserted road. Suddenly a brand new
Porsche screeches to a halt. The driver, a man dressed in an Armani
suit, Cerutti shoes, Ray-Ban sunglasses, TAG-Heuer wrist-watch, and a
Versace tie, gets out and asks the Shepherd:
Man: “If I can tell you how many sheep you have, will you give me one of them?”
The shepherd looks at the young man, and then looks at the large flock of grazing sheep and replies:
Shepherd: “Okay.”
The young man parks the car, connects his laptop to the mobile-fax,
enters a NASA Webster, scans the ground using his GPS, opens a database
and 60 Excel tables filled with logarithms and pivot tables, then
prints out a 150 page report on his high-tech mini-printer. He turns to
the shepherd and says,
Man: “You have exactly 1,586 sheep here.”
The shepherd cheers,
Shepherd: “That’s correct, you can have your sheep.”
The young man makes his pick and puts it in the back of his Porsche. The shepherd looks at him and asks,
Shepherd: “If I guess your profession, will you return my animal to me?”
The young man answers;
Man: “Yes, why not?”
Shepherd: "You are an IT consultant."
Man: “How did you know?”
Shepherd:
“Very simple. First, you came here without being called. Second, you
charged me a fee to tell me something I already knew, and third, you
don’t understand anything about my business…Now can I have my DOG back?"
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A Microsoft dev is walking down a walking
path on campus when he hears a frog say, "If you kiss me, I will turn
into a beautiful woman. We can get married, and I will be your loving
wife forever". The geek and the frog stare at each other for a bit, and
then he picks up the frog and gently places her in his front pocket.
The frog sticks her head out and says "aren't you going to kiss me?"
"No" says the dev, "I work for Microsoft, I don't have time for a wife - but a talking frog is really cool!"
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An architect, a hooker and a programmer were talking one evening, and
somehow, the discussion turned to which profession was the oldest.
"Come on, you guys! Everyone knows mine is the oldest profession,"
said the hooker.
"Ah," said the architect, "but before your profession existed, there
had to be people, and who was there before people?"
"What are you getting at, God?" The hooker asked.
"And was He not the divine architect of the universe?" The architect
asked, looking smug.
The programmer had been silent, but now he spoke up. "And before God
took on himself the role of an architect, what was there?"
"Darkness and chaos," the hooker said.
"And who do you think created chaos?" the programmer said.
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Robin Hood And Friar Tuck
The following story was posted in
news.sysadmin recently.
The more things change, the more they
stay the same...
Back in the mid-1970s, several of the
system support staff at Motorola (I
believe it was) discovered a
relatively simple way to crack system
security on the Xerox CP-V timesharing
system (or it may have been CP-V's
predecessor UTS). Through a simple
programming strategy, it was possible
for a user program to trick the system
into running a portion of the program
in "master mode" (supervisor state),
in which memory protection does not
apply. The program could then poke a
large value into its "privilege level"
byte (normally write-protected) and
could then proceed to bypass all
levels of security within the
file-management system, patch the
system monitor, and do numerous other
interesting things. In short, the
barn door was wide open.
Motorola quite properly reported this
problem to XEROX via an official
"level 1 SIDR" (a bug report with a
perceived urgency of "needs to be
fixed yesterday"). Because the text
of each SIDR was entered into a
database that could be viewed by quite
a number of people, Motorola followed
the approved procedure: they simply
reported the problem as "Security
SIDR", and attached all of the
necessary documentation,
ways-to-reproduce, etc. separately.
Xerox apparently sat on the problem...
they either didn't acknowledge the
severity of the problem, or didn't
assign the necessary
operating-system-staff resources to
develop and distribute an official
patch.
Time passed (months, as I recall).
The Motorola guys pestered their Xerox
field-support rep, to no avail.
Finally they decided to take Direct
Action, to demonstrate to Xerox
management just how easily the system
could be cracked, and just how
thoroughly the system security systems
could be subverted.
They dug around through the
operating-system listings, and devised
a thoroughly devilish set of patches.
These patches were then incorporated
into a pair of programs called Robin
Hood and Friar Tuck. Robin Hood and
Friar Tuck were designed to run as
"ghost jobs" (daemons, in Unix
terminology); they would use the
existing loophole to subvert system
security, install the necessary
patches, and then keep an eye on one
another's statuses in order to keep
the system operator (in effect, the
superuser) from aborting them.
So... one day, the system operator on
the main CP-V software-development
system in El Segundo was surprised by
a number of unusual phenomena. These
included the following (as I recall...
it's been a while since I heard the
story):
Tape drives would rewind and dismount their tapes in the middle
of a job.
Disk drives would seek back&forth so rapidly that they'd attempt to walk
across the floor.
The card-punch output device would occasionally start up of itself and
punch a "lace card" (every hole
punched). These would usually jam in
the punch.
The console would print snide and insulting messages from Robin Hood
to Friar Tuck, or vice versa.
The Xerox card reader had two output stackers; it could be instructed to
stack into A, stack into B, or stack
into A unless a card was unreadable,
in which case the bad card was
placed into stacker B. One of the
patches installed by the ghosts
added some code to the card-reader
driver... after reading a card, it
would flip over to the opposite
stacker. As a result, card decks
would divide themselves in half when
they were read, leaving the operator
to recollate them manually.
I believe that there were some other
effects produced, as well.
Naturally, the operator called in the
operating-system developers. They
found the bandit ghost jobs running,
and X'ed them... and were once again
surprised. When Robin Hood was X'ed,
the following sequence of events took
place:
!X id1
id1: Friar Tuck... I am under
attack! Pray save me! (Robin Hood)
id1: Off (aborted)
id2: Fear not, friend Robin! I
shall rout the Sheriff of Nottingham's
men!
id3: Thank you, my good fellow!
(Robin)
Each ghost-job would detect the fact
that the other had been killed, and
would start a new copy of the
recently-slain program within a few
milliseconds. The only way to kill
both ghosts was to kill them
simultaneously (very difficult) or to
deliberately crash the system.
Finally, the system programmers did
the latter... only to find that the
bandits appeared once again when the
system rebooted! It turned out that
these two programs had patched the
boot-time image (the /vmunix file, in
Unix terms) and had added themselves
to the list of programs that were to
be started at boot time...
The Robin Hood and Friar Tuck ghosts
were finally eradicated when the
system staff rebooted the system from
a clean boot-tape and reinstalled the
monitor. Not long thereafter, Xerox
released a patch for this problem.
I believe that Xerox filed a complaint
with Motorola's management about the
merry-prankster actions of the two
employees in question. To the best of
my knowledge, no serious disciplinary
action was taken against either of
these guys.
Several years later, both of the
perpetrators were hired by Honeywell,
which had purchased the rights to CP-V
after Xerox pulled out of the
mainframe business. Both of them made
serious and substantial contributions
to the Honeywell CP-6 operating system
development effort. Robin Hood (Dan
Holle) did much of the development of
the PL-6 system-programming language
compiler; Friar Tuck (John Gabler) was
one of the chief
communications-software gurus for
several years. They're both alive and
well, and living in LA (Dan) and
Orange County (John). Both are among
the more brilliant people I've had the
pleasure of working with.
Disclaimers: it has been quite a while
since I heard the details of how this
all went down, so some of the details
above are almost certainly wrong. I
shared an apartment with John Gabler
for several years, and he was my Best
Man when I married back in '86... so
I'm somewhat predisposed to believe
his version of the events that
occurred.