Index  Comments

This is a venue for listing jokes and other pieces I've written, updated as I write more.

A UDP joke:

A man asks a bartender for a drink.
The bartender is unsure if he heard something, so he asks ``What?''.
But the man was already dead.

A poem about CONSes:

CONS me to the front of a list,
or any other element, if you wish.
If I'm circular, then I'm not to blame,
but do not worry, as I'll MAP the same.
When you don't know, I'm here to play,
as I'm here to add to, in any way.
When GC gets me, I won't be gone,
I'll just be reused, for another CONS.

A C joke:

It's said that only optimists kill themselves, as pessimists have no reason to.
From this, we can conclude that C is an optimistic language; if enough things go wrong, a C program will generally think ``Oh well, I guess I'll kill myself now.''

On UNIX:

If operating systems were college students, UNIX would be the school shooter.

Concerning Architectures:

What did the register machine say to the stack machine?
Move.

On Centralization:

It's interesting to me, how there is all of this talk about how large some of these centralized services are.
You'll read something such as ``Yeah, we're dealing with so much stuff every second. It takes a lot of specialized software just to make it manageable.''
Very rarely will you read that, perhaps, this is proof that this is a bad idea.

A minimalism joke:

Another UNIX joke:

One programmer is arguing with another, a proponent of C and UNIX, about some contested topic, say garbage collection, but any will do for this template.
The UNIX programmer thinks about garbage collection. His mind mirrors how UNIX operates. His mind launches a sh program. That sh program launches twenty different processes, all with stacks and large buffers, since they're written in C. Over a megabyte of data is passed through costly reads and writes from pipes. Fifteen temporary files are created.
``I don't know,'' he starts, ``don't you think that's inefficient?''

Say this one aloud:

What is the pride and joy of German computer engineering?
Not C.

Another UNIX joke:

A UNIX fanatic ventures to a computing museum.
He stands in awe at the PDP-11 running an early version of UNIX, along with the VAX running BSD and the IBM PC running GNU/Linux. He claps when he sees the Linux kernel kill a random process to reclaim its memory, since this is the only recovery strategy that can exist.
He takes note of the beauty of RISC machines that can't multiply in a single instruction and require many bytes to load and store a value.
He passes by the Multics machine, having many privilege levels and advanced memory management.
He ignores the Burroughs machines, having type and bounds checking in the hardware.
He completely disregards the Lisp machines, with advanced math routines and the ability to have a single language for the system software and user programs alike.
He stops at an IBM PC running Windows near the gift shop and remarks on how great it is that we have UNIX, as otherwise we'd be using Windows and that would be just awful.

Concerning Ada:

If you want to kill people on purpose, use Ada. If you want to kill people by accident, use C.

Concerning the Abrahamic god:

How do we know God likes cryptography?
He always has plausible deniability.

On the ``UNIX philosophy'':

If you wanted to design a weapon according to the ``UNIX philosophy'', it should clearly do only one thing and do it well and that thing should be killing, so you should use poison.
If the enemy refuses to take it, just teach the enemy C and wait for them to kill themselves.

A haiku for Firefox:

Firefox starts up
I bring up my tabs again.
Then, a crash anew.

Again concerning UNIX:

Surely you're familiar with the common sayings about the quality of code written by scientists of other fields?
Dennis Ritchie was originally a physicist.
That explains some things, doesn't it?

With regards to how many software companies operate:

Business up front, open source in the back.

A C poem:

Look at me, my name is C,
And you will soon know why.
Whenever I run out of stack space,
I fall down and cry.

For APL:

What did the function say to the mixed array?
I don't serve your kind.

With regards to Internet ``Services'' (I suppose I recalled this more than independently created it):

What do you call a service that requires a proprietary client, isn't documented, spies on its users, and more?
It's a disservice.

This is from a serious conversation concerning the WWW:

The WWW is a textual protocol with misspelled words.

Concerning the aptly-named git:

Git's bisect command is intended to find bugs. The algorithm used is for hunting a wolf in Alaska: Wait for the wolf to howl and then search on which half you heard it from, recursively. This may seem profound, but is actually an exceedingly unintelligent method no human would use in general and is obvious if the wolf actually can be heard at a point. It is how a retard would hunt a wolf. Clearly, a human would use a more intelligent tracking method. That git uses this method for determining bugs shows how unintelligent it is and, just as with hunting animals, there are clearly better methods for finding bugs, but try explaining that to someone convinced of their method.

With regards to Linux kernel development practices:

The Linux kernel, due to C, is a monument to convention.

With regards to the current state of cyberspace:

Most hypermedia would better be called hypertedium.

Concerning how many write their software:

The only way to write good software is to have it be correct and able to be fast and then have it made to actually be fast. Most software isn't correct, but is able to be fast, and is then made to be slow in an infinitesimal stepping towards correctness.

Concerning economic systems:

What do communists and capitalists have in common?
They both describe their chosen systems in terms of theoretical models that don't actually exist.

Concerning UNIX yet again:

What is one of the most important qualities of interface design in UNIX?
It should be allowed to fail and it should have intractable failure cases solved by a different interface that features its own intractable failure cases.

A poem dedicated to UNIX:

Oh, UNIX, with partitions so far and wide.
There your unused space will hide.
That process over there just died.
Oh, UNIX, driving me to homicide.

A poem for complicated systems; this may be added upon later:

Look at the systems we create.
They're complex, but we'll automate. -or- Complicated; we'll automate.
Then we'll automate them in turn.
Simplicity we often spurn.

Concerning insecurity:

Why do so many ``security researchers'' like and promote C?
They want to keep their jobs.

Concerning simple and complex systems:

There's a strong desire to distill one's ideas into a small amount of pleasant and aesthetic essences, but this also leads to dreaded academic issues that could be exemplified as ``Well of course we need to pass a closure to this higher order function in this lambda to this lambda to that lambda to this lambda's third cousin and so on; it keeps the basics simple!''; how dreaded and complex I've seen so many simple systems become to accomodate things.

Concerning the Rust programming language:

Rust is simply the effeminate man's Ada.

With regards to universities in the United States:

Colleges are quick to create degrees related to ``cyber'' topics.
There would be ``cyber nursing'' degrees if they thought they could get away with it.

Also concerning the ``UNIX philosophy'':

The ``UNIX philosophy'' is simply brand-named simplicity. The ideas of modularity and simplicity predate automatic computing and recorded history, and yet people will claim you're following UNIX if you write a program that adheres to these basic ideals. Further, those other qualities of this ``philosophy'' result in programs that aren't modular, simple, nor beautiful.

Concerning markets:

The ``invisible hand'' of ``the free market'' seems more concerned with masturbation than anything.

On a tenant of the ``UNIX philosophy'':

Text is the universal interface, yes, so long as it's ASCII, I mean EBCDIC, I mean Latin-1, I mean Shift-JIS, I mean UTF-16, I mean UTF-8. Yes, text is the universal interface.

With regards to religious idioms:

Occasionally I find myself wanting to use a religious idiom, such as ``God forbid'', but also do not want to legitimize the god. You can use ``your'' to make use of such idioms without doing so and as it's a single syllable, other people may not even notice.
So, ``God forbid'' becomes ``Your god forbid''.

Regarding Internet statistics:

Why is HTTP the overwhelming majority of Internet traffic, by some metrics?
It's easy to overwhelm the network with a profoundly inefficient protocol.

Regarding human interaction:

If you seek to seem more generous than you actually are, simply offer to help when you figure others don't actually need help; this also applies to generosity and like interactions. Further, if you're later asked for something previously offered and denied, you can use that to avoid that action then.

A license analogy:

Copyleft licenses are akin to types provided by a programming language's standard library; one could write one's own, but it's usually better to simply use the same as most everyone else.

Regarding APL:

Why is ed a decent editor for APL?
You're only going to write one line anyway.

A haiku for the Internet:

An old post startles.
I'd written it so long back;
there's still no response.

Regarding common programming actions:

We're bravely rushing towards incorrect answers.

Regarding the WWW:

People were worried about the collider, but worse came from CERN.

A fun rhyme concerning debate:

Where reason fails, violence prevails.

A poem for Go, perhaps to be extended later:

Go, Go, look at it go.
Already like what I already know.
Generics are bad; generics are lame.
If err is nil is nice and tame.
I solve my problems with language so thin.
Writing the same things again and again.
My code reads like all of the rest.
That's how I know I've done my best.
When I'm replaced somewhen, I'll know,
They'll have no problems reading my Go.

Concerning profits and proselytization:

What is a similarity between major religions and major corporations?
After they saturate domestically, they begin making massive appeals to foreigners.

This haiku was inspired by the behaviour of those around me:

I read a headline.
No relation to my life.
I read another.

Concerning humor:

Perhaps the most important aspect to a good joke is that others don't understand or necessarily even notice it.

Concerning two program categories:

The opposite of a daemon is an angel; unlike daemons, angels only appear when a god has specifically demanded they do so.