In this article, I’ve listed a whole bunch of programmer jokes that only programmers will understand!
Most of these jokes have been sourced from StackOverflow and Reddit, with many of them sent to me by other programmers in my career.
There’s some good ones, some lame ones, and some that are so old they’re probably not funny any more.
Enjoy!
Programming Language Jokes
“Knock, knock.”
“Who’s there?”
very long pause….
“Java.”
A SQL query goes into a bar, walks up to two tables and asks, “Can I join you?”
When your hammer is C++, everything begins to look like a thumb.
If you put a million monkeys at a million keyboards, one of them will eventually write a Java program.
The rest of them will write Perl programs.
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.”
The C language combines all the power of assembly language with all the ease-of-use of assembly language.
Differences between languages:
- Ada : You aim at your foot and pull the trigger, but the safety stops the gun from firing. The safety won’t budge until you tag your foot with a sign reading “”Bullet Hole in this foot””, and call the paramedics. You do so, then shoot yourself in the foot.
- C : The gun comes in 38 pieces, with a set of assembly instructions. After painstakingly assembling the pieces, you pull the trigger and the gun promptly backfires and blows your head off.
- Assembly : The same as C, except you have to hand-machine all the pieces as well. When you pull the trigger, your whole house explodes.
- Java: You break into someone else’s home and steal their water pistol. You then make a child gun that uses .38 rounds instead of water. When you pull the trigger on the child gun, nothing happens to you, but everyone who visits your house gets shot in the foot.
- Basic : You aim the gun at a straight horizontal and pull the trigger, which causes a stream of water to be squirted straight down onto your foot.
- Perl : You aim the gun at your foot and pull the trigger. There is no explosion, but gravity causes the bullet to slide out of the barrel and bounce off your foot.
- Lisp : You do a small part of the remaining work involved in shooting yourself in the foot. You then call yourself, and tell yourself to shoot yourself in the foot.
- Pascal : The same as Ada, except when you pull the trigger a little sign pops out reading “”BANG!””.
- C++ : The same as Java, except you try to build the parent water pistol using the gun tools from the C gun. When you pull the trigger on the child gun, the parent C gun explodes, spraying water everywhere, including the chamber of the child gun. This causes the child gun to backfire, blowing your head off.
- Visual C++ : The same as C++, except that the bullets, the gun parts, the tools you use to put it together, the hospital you get taken to afterwards, and the ambulance that takes you there are all owned by the same company.
- APL : Whenever you pull the trigger, no matter where you aim the gun, the bullet ricochets off of 13 objects and lodges in your foot. The gun has been examined by ballistics experts, mechanical engineers, and even the person who made it, and none of them can figure out how it works.
- FORTRAN : When you aim the gun at your foot and pull the trigger, a table indexing error causes the gun to shoot its firing pin into your foot instead of the bullet.
Why are Assembly programmers always soaking wet? They work below C-level.
Why do Java programmers have to wear glasses? Because they don’t C#.
How do you tell HTML from HTML5? Try it out in Internet Explorer. Did it work? No? It’s HTML5.
A programmer had a problem. He decided to use Java. He now has a ProblemFactory.
3 SQL databases walked into a NoSQL bar. A little while later they walked out, because they couldn’t find a table.
An SQL query goes into a bar, walks up to two tables, and asks, “Can I join you?”
A web developer walks into a restaurant. He immediately leaves in disgust as the restaurant was laid out in tables.
Syntax and Code Jokes
Why do programmers always mix up Halloween and Christmas?
A: Because Oct 31 == Dec 25!”
“[“”hip””,””hip””]
(hip hip array!)”
A programmer started to cuss
Because getting to sleep was a fuss
As she lay there in bed
Looping ’round in her head
was: while(!asleep()) sheep++
; – Hide and seek champion since 1994
Real programmers count from 0
General Computer Science Jokes
What’s the object-oriented way to become wealthy?
Inheritance.
To understand what recursion is, you must first understand recursion.
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.
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.”
ASCII stupid question, get a stupid ANSI.
Two bytes meet. The first byte asks, “Are you ill?”
The second byte replies, “No, just feeling a bit off.”
Two threads walk into a bar. The barkeeper looks up and yells, “Hey, I want don’t any conditions race like time last!”
A programmer is sent to the grocery store with instructions to “Buy butter and see whether they have eggs, if they do, then buy 10.”
Returning with 10 butters, the programmer says, “They had eggs.”
Eight bytes walk into a bar. The bartender asks, “Can I get you anything?”
“Yeah,” reply the bytes. “Make us a double.”
Why did the programmer quit his job?
Because he didn’t get arrays.
The programmer got stuck in the shower because the instructions on the shampoo bottle said Lather, Rinse, Repeat
UNIX is user friendly. It’s just very particular about who its friends are.
I don’t see women as objects. I consider each to be in a class of her own.
There are 2 types of people in the world. Those who can extrapolate from incomplete data…
There are 2 hard problems in computer science: caching, naming, and off-by-1 errors.
3 Errors walk into a bar. The barman says, “Normally I’d Throw you all out, but tonight I’ll make an Exception.”
How do you change a light bulb in OO programming?
You don’t. Instead, you tell the lamp to do it.
How do you change a light bulb in functional programming?
You can’t, at least not in pure functional programming.
How do you change a light bulb in logical programming?
You imply that it is changed.
How do you change a light bulb in concurrent programming?
You take the lamp to a secure area so nobody else can try to change the light bulb while you’re changing it. Alternatively, you might get a lamp with light bulbs that can’t be changed, and just get a new lamp when the light bulb goes out.
An attractive String walks into a Java cafe, and sees an int, a boolean, and a double sitting at the bar.
The int walks up to her and says, “Hey baby, we can make interesting things happen with you around me.” The String promptly slaps him, and the int walks away.
The boolean walks up to her and says, “Hey girl, you don’t know me yet, but you can trust that I’m your true love.” The String rejects him as well, saying, “Not until I say so!” and the boolean walks away too.
The double tries next and says, “I may not be good with money, but I can definitely show you a good time.” The String quickly declines and orders her drink.
The bartender asks casually asks, “Were those primitives bothering you?”
The String says, “Yeah, totally…. They’ve got no class!”
How do you explain the movie Inception to a programmer?
Basically, when you run a VM inside another VM, inside another VM, inside another VM…, everything runs real slow.
Some people, when confronted with a problem, think, ‘I know, I’ll use threads’ – and then two they hav erpoblesm.
Knock knock.
Race condition.
Who’s there?
What’s the best thing thing about UDP jokes?
I don’t care if you get them.
What’s the best part about TCP jokes?
I get to keep telling them until you get them.
A man came into work, and one of his co-workers had a parrot on his shoulder. All though the morning, the bird would squawk and say, “pieces of seven, pieces of seven”.
Finally he could stand it no longer and went to the co-worker’s cubicle. “Shouldn’t it be ‘pieces of eight’?”, he asked.
“Oh, that’s a parroty error.”
Hardware (noun): the part of a computer that you can kick.
If IE can be bold enough to ask to be your default browser then man up and ask any girl out.
Chuck Norris Programmer Jokes
Chuck Norris can take a screenshot of his blue screen of death
When Chuck Norris throws exceptions, it’s across the room.
All arrays Chuck Norris declares are of infinite size, because Chuck Norris knows no bounds.
Chuck Norris doesn’t have disk latency because the hard drive knows to hurry the hell up.
Chuck Norris writes code that optimizes itself.
Chuck Norris can’t test for equality because he has no equal.
Chuck Norris doesn’t need garbage collection because he doesn’t call .Dispose(), he calls .DropKick().
Chuck Norris’s first program was kill -9.
All browsers support the hex definitions #chuck and #norris for the colors black and blue.
Chuck Norris can write infinite recursion functions…and have them return.
Chuck Norris doesn’t use web standards as the web will conform to him.
“It works on my machine” always holds true for Chuck Norris.
Whiteboards are white because Chuck Norris scared them that way.
Chuck Norris doesn’t do Burn Down charts, he does Smack Down charts.
Chuck Norris can delete the Recycling Bin.
Chuck Norris’s beard can type 140 wpm.
Chuck Norris can unit test entire applications with a single assert.
Chuck Norris doesn’t bug hunt as that signifies a probability of failure, he goes bug killing.
Chuck Norris’s keyboard doesn’t have a Ctrl key because nothing controls Chuck Norris.
When Chuck Norris is web surfing websites get the message “Warning: Internet Explorer has deemed this user to be malicious or dangerous. Proceed?”.
Being a Programmer
Programming is like sex: One mistake and you have to support it for the rest of your life.
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.”
The fantastic element that explains the appeal of games to many developers is neither the fire-breathing monsters nor the milky-skinned, semi-clad sirens; it is the experience of carrying out a task from start to finish without any change in the user requirements.
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.”
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!”
A good programmer is someone who looks both ways before crossing a one-way street.
Programmer (noun): A machine that turns coffee into code
Programmer (noun): A person who fixed a problem that you don’t know you have, in a way you don’t understand
What’s a programmer’s favourite hangout place? Foo Bar
What do computers and air conditioners have in common? They both become useless when you open windows.
99 little bugs in the code, 99 bugs in the code, 1 bug fixed, compile again, 153 little bugs in the code
Software can be fast, reliable and cheap. Choose any two.
Programmers vs. Other People
How do you tell an introverted computer scientist from an extroverted computer scientist?
An extroverted computer scientist looks at your shoes when he talks to you.
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, but 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.”
How many programmers does it take to change a light bulb?
None, that’s a hardware problem.
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!”
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?”
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, “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, “You have exactly 1,586 sheep here.”
The shepherd cheers. “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, “If I guess your profession, will you return my animal to me?”
The young man answers, “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?”
How to catch an 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 pre-hunted 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.
Drug dealers:
- Refer to their clients as “”users”.
- “The first one’s free!”
- Have important South-East Asian connections (to help move the stuff).
- Strange jargon: “Stick”, “Rock”, “Dime bag,” “E”.
- Realize that there’s tons of cash in the 14- to 25-year-old market.
- Job is assisted by industry’s producing newer, more potent mixes.
- Often seen in the company of pimps and hustlers.
- Their product causes unhealthy addictions.
- Do your job well, and you can sleep with sexy movie stars who depend on you.
Software developers:
- Refer to their clients as “users”.
- “Download a free trial version…”
- Have important South-East Asian connections (to help debug the code).
- Strange jargon: “SCSI”, “ISDN”, “Java”, “RTFM”
- Realize that there’s tons of cash in the 14- to 25-year-old market.
- Job is assisted by industry’s producing newer, faster machines.
- Often seen in the company of marketing people and venture capitalists.
- Their product causes unhealthy addictions – Fallout, Minecraft, World of Warcraft.
- Damn! Damn! DAMN!!!
A group of programmers and marketers were travelling 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 for programming!”
An optimist says the glass is half full. A pessimist says the glass is half empty. A programmer says the glass is twice as large as necessary.
What’s the difference between an enterprise software salesperson and a used car dealer?
The used car dealer knows when he’s lying.
What did the Project Manager say to the Programmer?
You start coding, I’ll go find out what they want.
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