Programming Joke
A friend and I were standing around the grill, watching the burgers cook. You know, if you don’t watch them they don’t get done. 
Another friend walks up and comes up with this immensely clever line:
“How many programmers does it take to grill hamburgers?”. (I should mention said friend is a salesman.
)
My first reaction is to offer a mocking half-laugh at this ‘joke’ (though admittedly, most of my jokes are worse). However, the programmer in me can’t resist the challenge of providing a technically correct answer.
“1”… Even though there are clearly two of us standing there.
From the salesman I receive a confused look and a “Huh?”. Moments later, my programmer friend starts laughing.
The salesman asks “What, is that some inside joke or something?”
The griller explains. “Let’s say you have an array of 10 numbers. You would expect them to be numbered 1 through 10. But the computer will number them 0 through 9 instead.”
I’m not sure if the next look from my salesman friend was more confusion, disgust, or some potent mixture of both.
November 24th, 2008 at 4:47 pm
This so reminds me of a discussion with some colleagues a couple of years ago. I had just gone to a conference for Advanced SQL programming of some sort….and I found this shirt that just made me laugh…..just a plain white shirt with black lettering that said
Select *
From Users
Where Clue >0
0 rows returned.
Clearly not advance, but I digress. I found this fabulous as most if not all of my users happened to be clueless.
So, I felt the need to pass on the joke to my equally geeky co-workers. This resulted in a string of emails debating whether it required a ‘;’ or not to actually run, and then whether it was ANSI-compliant or Oracle sql…as this has bearing on the need for said ‘;’. So, needless to say, I was the least of the geeks in that one…..amazing really as the intitial intent of the joke was lost. Leave to the IT folks.
Just had to share.