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.

Q: Why do programmers always mix up Halloween and Christmas?

A: Because Oct 31 == Dec 25!

Command line Russian roulette

[ $[ $RANDOM % 6 ] == 0 ] && rm -rf / || echo *Click*

Told by Gerald Weinberg in various incarnations:

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."

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?"

Unix is user friendly. It's just very particular about who its friends are.

Richard Stallman, Linus Torvalds, and Donald Knuth engage in a discussion on whose impact on computer science was the greatest.

Stallman: "God told me I have programmed the best editor in the world!"

Torvalds: "Well, God told me that I have programmed the best operating system in the world!"

Knuth: "Wait, wait, I never said that."

A novice programmer was explained the meaning of RTFM. He showed up the next day saying: "So I went out and bought the Kama Sutra. Now what?"

Meta-joke: If you tell the joke above to a non-programmer, he will ask: "What's RTFM?" A programmer will ask: "What's Kama Sutra?"

Meta-meta-joke: If instead of laughing in response in the meta-joke above you have asked "I knew both, now who am I", then you are probably a programmer over the age of 30, who has realized the value of social skills, and who may even be married, but who is still an uber-geek who takes things way too literally.

If you have asked "I googled both, now who am I", then you are probably a high-school kid who reads stackoverflow and takes things way too literally, but who had not yet known about RTFM or Kama Sutra. Congratulations, you are well on your way to becoming an uber-geek. Please try to acquire some social skills along the way. You may not think so now, but they do come in handy.

A programmer puts two glasses on his bedside table before going to sleep. A full one, in case he gets thirsty, and an empty one, in case he doesn't.

A foo walks into a bar, takes a look around and says "Hello World!" and meet up his friend Baz.

I like to believe that I invented (or more likely independently discovered) this joke.

Q: Why don't jokes work in octal?

A: Because 7 10 11.

If your mom was a collection class, her insert method would be public.

Female software engineers become sexually irresistible at the age of consent, and remain that way until about thirty minutes after clinical death. Longer if it's a warm day.

This is from the 70s. It can easily be updated to the present day, but it has a certain charm just the way it is:

Three women sat discussing their husbands and their sex lives.

"My husband's a wrestler," said the first. "He's really strong and aggressive in bed."

"My husband's an artist," said the second. "He's really gentle and sensitive."

"My husband's an IBM salesman," said the third. "He sits on the edge of the bed and tells me how good it's going to be when I finally get it."

The C language combines all the power of assembly language with all the ease-of-use of assembly language.

A group of programmers and marketers were traveling to a trade show on a train. Each of the marketers had bought a ticket, but the programmers had only bought one ticket for the lot of them.

One of the programmers was keeping a lookout, and when the conductor neared their car he called out "The conductor's coming!" and all of the programmers piled into the train's lavatory and closed the door. The conductor took the tickets of all of the marketers, and then knocked on the lavatory door and called "Ticket please." The programmers slid their ticket under the door, and the conductor took it and left.

The programmers were laughing at the marketers for the rest of the trip, and the marketers felt like idiots.

On the way back, the marketers decided they would use the same trick and only bought one ticket for them. But this time, the programmers didn't buy a single ticket! Again, one of the programmers kept a lookout for the conductor. When he called "Conductor coming!" all of the programmers piled into one lavatory, and all of the marketers shut themselves into another lavatory.

One programmer came back out of his lavatory, knocked on the other door, and said "Ticket please!"

Three men are talking: A programmer, a doctor, and a lawyer. The lawyer says, "Man, the only way is to have a mistress. With all these divorce suits, it's terrible. The only way is to have a mistress." The doctor says, "Are you kidding? With all the STDs out there, you want a wife and that's it." The programmer says, "You need both a wife and a mistress. Because when you're not with the mistress, she'll assume you're with your wife, and when you're not with your wife, she'll assume you're with your mistress, and THAT leaves you more time to be in the lab programming!"

A novice was trying to fix a broken Lisp machine by turning the power off and on.

Knight, seeing what the student was doing, spoke sternly: "You cannot fix a machine by just power-cycling it with no understanding of what is going wrong."

Knight turned the machine off and on.

The machine worked.

Q: how many Microsoft programmers does it take to change a light bulb?

A: none, they just make darkness a standard and tell everyone "this behavior is by design"

How long does it take to copy a file in Vista? Yeah, I don't know either, I'm still waiting to find out.

Two bytes meet. The first byte asks, "Are you ill?"

The second byte replies, "No, just feeling a bit off."

An infinite number of mathematicians walk into a bar.

The first orders a beer, the second orders half a beer, the third orders a quarter of a beer, the fourth an eighth, and so on.

The bartender looks at the line going out the door,turns to the line and says "you guys suck!".

Then he pours two beers and walks away.