A programmer had been missing from work for over a week when finally someone noticed and called the cops.
They went round to his home and broke the door down. They found him dead in the still running shower with an empty bottle of shampoo next to his body. Apparently he’d been washing his hair.
The instructions on the bottle said:
- Wet hair
- Apply shampoo
- Wait 2 minutes
- Rinse
- Repeat
Q: Why didn’t Intel call the Pentium the 586?
A: Because they added 486 and 100 on the first Pentium and got 585.999983605.
Q: How many programmers does it take to screw in a light bulb?
A: None, that’s a hardware problem.
Q: What’s another name for the “Intel Inside” sticker they put on Pentiums?
A: The warning label.
Q: How does Bill Gates screw in a lightbulb?
A: He doesn’t. He declares darkness the industry standard.
If debugging is the process of removing bugs, then programming must be the process of putting them in.
Real programmers don’t document. If it was hard to write, it should be hard to read.
2 + 2 = 5 for extremely large values of 2.
ASCII stupid question, get a stupid ANSI! (groan)
WindowsME: The only computer virus with a user interface.
A man is walking down the street. He looks over and sees a frog sitting there on the sidewalk. The frog looks up and says in a sweet voice, “I am really a princess. If you
kiss me just once, I will return to my human form and do anything for you.” The man picks up the frog, looks at it, and places it in his pocket. He then heads on his way again.
Shortly a voice is heard from his pocket: “Didn’t you hear me? If you kiss me, I will turn into a beautiful princess and do anything for you.” The man takes the frog from his
pocket, looks at it for a moment, and returns is to his pocket. Shortly the voice is heard again, this time with a frustrated tone: “Hey! What’s wrong with you?! I said if you kiss
me I’ll turn into a beautiful princess and do anything you want!” The man pulls out the frog and says to it, “Look, I’m a computer science student. I don’t have time for a
girlfriend, but a talking frog is kind of neat.”
A helicopter was flying around above Seattle when an electrical malfunction disabled all of the aircraft’s electronic navigation and communication equipment. Due to clouds
and haze, the pilot could not determine the helicopter’s position and course. He needed help to steer to the airport. The pilot saw a tall building, flew over to it, and while
circling the building, drew a handwritten sign and held it up to the helicopter’s window. The sign said “WHERE AM I?” in large letters. The people in the building quickly responded
to the helicopter, drew a large sign and held it up to the building’s window. Their sign read “YOU ARE IN A HELICOPTER.” The pilot smiled, waved to the people in the building,
looked at his map, and flew straight back to Seattle airport and landed. After they were on the ground the passenger asked the pilot how the sign “YOU ARE IN A HELICOPTER” helped
determine his position? The pilot responded, “I knew I had to be at the Microsoft building because, similar to their help lines, they gave me a technically correct, but completely
useless answer”.
Top 17 Programmer’s Terminologies
- A number of different approaches are being tried - We are still ****ing in the wind.
- Extensive report is being prepared on a fresh approach to the problem - we just hired three kids fresh out of college.
- Close project coordination - We know who to blame.
- Major technological breakthrough - It works ok, but looks very hi-tech.
- Customer satisfaction is delivered assured - We are so far behind schedule the customer is happy to get it delivered.
- Preliminary operational tests were inconclusive - The darn thing blew up when we threw the switch.
- Test results were extremely gratifying - We are so surprised that the stupid thing works.
- The entire concept will have to be abandoned - The only person who understood the thing quit.
- It is in the process - It is so wrapped up in red tape that the situation is about hopeless.
- We will look into it - Forget it! We have enough problems for now.
- Please note and initial - Let’s spread the responsibility for the screw up.
- Give us the benefit of your thinking - We’ll listen to what you have to say as long as it doesn’t interfere with what we’ve already done.
- Give us your interpretation - i can’t wait to hear this bull!
- See me or let’s discuss - come into my office, i’m lonely.
- Al new - code not interchangeable with the previous design.
- Years of development - it finally worked!
- Low maintenance - impossible to fix if broken.
What if Computer Manufacturers made Toasters…
If IBM made toasters…
They would want one big toaster where people bring bread to be submitted for overnight toasting. IBM would claim a worldwide market for five, maybe six toasters.
If Xerox made toasters…
You could toast one sided or double sided. Successive slices would get lighter and lighter. The toaster would jam your bread for you.
If Radio Shack made toasters…
The staff would sell you a toaster, but not know anything about it. Or you could buy all the parts to build your own toaster.
If Oracle made toasters…
They’d claim their toaster was compatible with all brands and styles of bread, but when you got it home you’d discover the Bagel Engine was still in development, the Croissant Extension was three years away, and that indeed the whole appliance was just blowing smoke.
If Sun made toasters…
The toast would burn often, but you could get a really good cuppa Java.
Does DEC still make toasters?…
They made good toasters in the ’80s, didn’t they?
If Hewlett Packard made toasters…
They would market the Reverse Polish Toaster, which takes in toast and gives you regular bread.
If Tandem made toasters…
You could make toast 24 hours a day, and if a piece got burned the toaster would automatically toast you a new one.
If Thinking Machines made toasters…
You would be able to toast 64,000 pieces of bread at the same time.
If Cray made toasters…
They would cost $16 million but would be faster than any other single slice toaster in the world.
If The Rand Corporation made toasters…
It would be a large, perfectly smooth and seamless black cube. Every morning there would be a piece of toast on top of it. Their service department would have an unlisted phone number, and the blueprints for the box would be highly classified government documents. The X-Files would have an episode about it.
If the NSA made toasters…
Your toaster would have a secret trap door that only the NSA could access in case they needed to get at your toast for reasons of national security.
If Sony made toasters…
The ToastMan, which would be barely larger than the single piece of bread it is meant to toast, can be conveniently attached to your belt.
If Microsoft made toasters…
Every time you bought a loaf of bread, you would have to buy a toaster. You wouldn’t have to take the toaster, but you’d still have to pay
for it anyway. Toaster’95 would weigh 15000 pounds (hence requiring a reinforced steel countertop), draw enough electricity to power a small city, take up 95% of the space in your
kitchen, would claim to be the first toaster that lets you control how light or dark you want your toast to be, and would secretly interrogate your other appliances to find out who
made them. Everyone would hate Microsoft toasters, but none the less would buy them since most of the good bread only works with their toasters.
If Apple made toasters…
It would do everything the Microsoft toaster does, but 5 years earlier.
Shooting Yourself in the Foot
or How to Determine Which Programming Language You’re Using. The proliferation of modern programming languages which seem to have stolen countless features from each other
sometimes makes it difficult to remember which language you’re using. This guide is offered as a public service to help programmers in such dilemmas.
C: You shoot yourself in the foot.
C++: You accidently create a dozen instances of yourself and shoot them all in the foot. Providing emergency medical care is impossible since you can’t tell which are
bitwise copies and which are just pointing at others and saying, “that’s me, over there.”
Objective C (NeXT): You write a protocol for shooting yourself in the foot so that all people can get shot in their feet.
Ada: If you are dumb enough to actually use this language, the United States Department of Defense will kidnap you, stand you up in front of a firing squad, and tell the
soldiers, “Shoot at his feet.” or After correctly packaging your foot, you attempt to concurrently load the gun, pull the trigger, scream and shoot yourself in the foot. When you
try, however, you discover that your foot is of the wrong type.
Algol: You shoot yourself in the foot with a musket. The musket is aesthetically fascinating, and the wound baffles the adolescent medic in the emergency room.
Pascal: The compiler won’t let you shoot yourself in the foot.
APL: You hear a gunshot, and there’s a hole in your foot, but you don’t remember enough linear algebra to understand what happened. or You shoot yourself in the foot, then
spend all day figuring out how to do it fewer characters.
Assembly: You crash the OS and overwrite the root disk. The system administrator arrives and shoots you in the foot. After a moment of contemplation, the administrator
shoots himself in the foot and then hops around the room rabidly shooting at everyone in sight. or You try to shoot yourself in the foot only to discover you must first reinvent the
gun, the bullet, and your foot.
BASIC: Shoot self in foot with water pistol. On big systems, continue until entire lower body is waterlogged.
Visual Basic: You’ll shoot yourself in the foot, but you’ll have so much fun doing it that you won’t care.
COBOL: USEing a COLT45 HANDGUN, AIM gun at LEG.FOOT, THEN place ARM.HAND.FINGER on HANDGUN.TRIGGER, and SQUEEZE. THEN return HANDGUN to HOLSTER. Check whether shoelace needs
to be retied.
DBase: You squeeze the trigger, but the bullet moves so slowly that by the time your foot feels the pain you’ve forgotten why you shot yourself anyway.
DBase IV version 1.0: You pull the trigger, but it turns out that the gun was a poorly designed grenade and the whole building blows up.
Forth: yourself foot shoot.
FORTRAN: You shoot yourself in each toe, iteratively, until you run out of toes, then you read in the next foot and repeat. If you run out of bullets, you continue anyway
because you have no exception processing ability.
Modula/2: After realizing that you can’t actually accomplish anything in the language, you shoot yourself in the head. sh, csh, etc.: You can’t remember the syntax for
anything, so you spend five hours reading man pages before giving up. You then shoot the computer and switch to C.
Smalltalk: You spend so much time playing with the graphics and windowing system that your boss shoots you in the foot, takes away your workstation, and makes you develop in
COBOL on a character terminal.
PL/I: You consume all available system resources, including all the offline bullets. The DataProcessing&Payroll Department doubles its size, triples its budget, acquires
four new mainframes, and drops the original one on your foot.
Prolog: You attempt to shoot yourself in the foot, but the bullet, failing to find its mark, backtracks to the gun which then explodes in your face. or You tell your program
you want to be shot in the foot. The program figures out how to do it, but the syntax doesn’t allow it to explain.
SNOBOL: You grab your foot with your hand, then rewrite your hand to be a bullet. The act of shooting the original foot then changes your hand/bullet into yet another foot
(a left foot). or If you succeed, shoot yourself in the left foot. If you fail, shoot yourself in the right foot.
lisp: You shoot yourself in the appendage which holds the gun with which you shoot yourself in the appendage which holds the gun with which you shoot yourself in the
appendage which holds the gun with which you shoot yourself in the appendage which holds… scheme: You shoot yourself in the appendage which holds the gun with which you shoot
yourself in the appendage which holds the gun with which you shoot yourself in the appendage which holds the gun with which you shoot yourself in the appendage which holds… …but
none of the other appendages are aware of this happening.
Paradox: Not only can you shoot yourself in the foot, your users can too.
Revelation: You’ll be able to shoot yourself in the foot just as soon as you figure out what all these bullets are for.
English: You put your foot in your mouth, then bite it off. CLIPPER: You grab a bullet, get ready to insert it in the gun so that you can shoot yourself in the foot, and
discover that the gun that the bullet fits has not yet been built, but should be arriving in the mail _REAL_SOON_NOW_.
SQL: You cut your foot off, send it out to a service bureau and when it returns, it has a hole in it, but will no longer fit the attachment at the end of your leg.
370 JCL: You send your foot down to MIS with a 4000 page document explaining how you want it to be shot. Three years later, your foot comes back deep fried.
Unix: % ls foot.c foot.h foot.o toe.c toe.o % rm * .o rm:.o: No such file or directory % ls % Concurrent Euclid: You shoot yourself in somebody else’s foot.
HyperTalk: Put the first bullet of the gun into foot left of leg of you. Answer the result.
Motif: You spend days writing a UIL description of your foot, the trajectory, the bullet, and the intricate scrollwork on the ivory handles of the gun. When you finally get
around to pulling the trigger, the gun jams. By unknown author.
What if Operating Systems Were Airlines?
DOS Airlines
Everybody pushes the airplane until it glides, then they jump on and let the plane coast until it hits the ground again, then they push again jump on again, and so on.
OS/2 Airlines
The terminal is almost empty, with only a few prospective passengers milling about. The announcer says that their flight has just departed, wishes them a good flight, though there
are no planes on the runway. Airline personnel walk around, apologising profusely to customers in hushed voices, pointing from time to time to the sleek, powerful jets outside the
terminal on the field. They tell each passenger how good the real flight will be on these new jets and how much safer it will be than Windows Airlines, but that they will have to
wait a little longer for the technicians to finish the flight systems.
Once they finally finished you’re offered a flight at reduced cost. To board the plane, you have your ticket stamped ten different times by standing in ten different lines. Then
you fill our a form showing where you want to sit and whether the plane should look and feel like an ocean liner, a passenger train or a bus. If you succeed in getting on the plane
and the plane succeeds in taking off the ground, you have a wonderful trip…except for the time when the rudder and flaps get frozen in position, in which case you will just have
time to say your prayers and get in crash position.
Windows Air
The terminal is pretty and colorful, with friendly stewards, easy baggage check and boarding, and a smooth take-off. After about 10 minutes in the air, the plane explodes with no
warning whatsoever.
Windows NT Air
Just like Windows Air, but costs more, uses much bigger planes, and takes out all the other aircraft within a 40-mile radius when it explodes.
Mac Airlines
All the stewards, stewardesses, captains, baggage handlers, and ticket agents look the same, act the same, and talk the same. Every time you ask questions about details, you are
told you don’t need to know, don’t want to know, and would you please return to your seat and watch the movie.
Unix Airlines
Each passenger brings a piece of the airplane and a box of tools to the airport. They gather on the tarmac, arguing constantly about what kind of plane they want to build and how
to put it together. Eventually, they build several different aircraft, but give them all the same name. Some passengers actually reach their destinations. All passengers believe
they got there.
Wings of OS/400
The airline has bought ancient DC-3s, arguably the best and safest planes that ever flew, and painted “747″ on their tails to make them look as if they are fast. The flight
attendants, of course, attend to your every need, though the drinks cost £15 a pop. Stupid questions cost £230 per hour, unless you have
SupportLine, which requires a
first class ticket and membership in the frequent flyer club. Then they cost £500, but your accounting department can call it overhead.
Mach Airlines
There is no airplane. The passengers gather and shout for an airplane, then wait and wait and wait and wait. A bunch of people come, each carrying one piece of the plane with them.
These people all go out on the runway and put the plane together piece by piece, arguing constantly about what kind of plane they’re building. The plane finally takes off, leaving
the passengers on the ground waiting and waiting and waiting and waiting. After the plane lands, the pilot telephones the passengers at the departing airport to inform them that
they have arrived.
Newton Airlines
After buying your ticket 18 months in advance, you finally get to board the plane. Upon boarding the plane you are asked your name. After 6 times, the crew member recognizes your
name and then you are allowed to take your seat. As you are getting ready to take your seat, the steward announces that you have to repeat the boarding process because they are out
of room and need to recount to make sure they can take more passengers.
VMS Airlines
The passengers all gather in the hanger, watching hundreds of technicians check the flight systems on this immense, luxury aircraft. This plane has at least 10 engines and seats
over 1,000 passengers. All the passengers scramble aboard, as do the necessary complement of 200 technicians. The pilot takes his place up in the glass cockpit. He guns the engines,
only to realise that the plane is too big to get through the hangar doors.
BeOS Air
You have to pay for the tickets, but they’re half the price of Windows Air, and if you are an aircraft mechanic you can probably ride for free. It only takes 15 minutes to get to
the airport and you are cheuferred there in a limozine. BeOS Air only has limited types of planes that only only hold new luggage. All planes are single seaters and the model names
all start with an “F” (F-14, F-15, F-16, F-18, etc.). The plane will fly you to your destination on autopilot in half the time of other Airways or you can fly the plane yourself.
There are limited destinations, but they are only places you’d want to go to anyway. You tell all your friends how great BeOS Air is and all they say is “What do you mean I can’t
bring all my old baggage with me?”
Linux Airlines
Disgruntled employees of all the other OS airlines decide to start their own airline. They build the planes, ticket counters, and pave the runways themselves. They charge a small
fee to cover the cost of printing the ticket, but you can also download and print the ticket yourself. When you board the plane, you are given a seat, four bolts, a wrench and a
copy of the seat-HOWTO.html. Once settled, the fully adjustable seat is very comfortable, the plane leaves and arrives on time without a single problem, the in-flight meal is
wonderful. You try to tell customers of the other airlines about the great trip, but all they can say is, “You had to do what with the seat?”
