Software Engineering Humor

NEWS CONTENTS

• 20190914 : The Man Who Could Speak Japanese ( Sep 14, 2019 , www.nakedcapitalism.com )
• 20190914 : Todds Humor Archive If Architects Had to Work Like Programmers ( Todd's Humor Archive If Architects Had to Work Like Programmers, )
• 20190914 : The story of Mel ( The story of Mel, )
• 20190914 : Todds Humor Archive Computer Engineers and Managers ( Todd's Humor Archive Computer Engineers and Managers, )
• 20190914 : So you want to marry a software engineer ( @ Jokes )

Old News ;-)

[Sep 14, 2019] The Man Who Could Speak Japanese

This impostor definitely demonstrated programming abilities, although at the time there was not such ter :-)

Notable quotes:

"... "We wrote it down. ..."

"... The next phrase was: ..."

"... " ' Booki fai kiz soy ?' " said Whitey. "It means 'Do you surrender?' " ..."

"... " ' Mizi pok loi ooni rak tong zin ?' 'Where are your comrades?' " ..."

"... "Tong what ?" rasped the colonel. ..."

"... "Tong zin , sir," our instructor replied, rolling chalk between his palms. He arched his eyebrows, as though inviting another question. There was one. The adjutant asked, "What's that gizmo on the end?" ..."

"... Of course, it might have been a Japanese newspaper. Whitey's claim to be a linguist was the last of his status symbols, and he clung to it desperately. Looking back, I think his improvisations on the Morton fantail must have been one of the most heroic achievements in the history of confidence men -- which, as you may have gathered by now, was Whitey's true profession. Toward the end of our tour of duty on the 'Canal he was totally discredited with us and transferred at his own request to the 81-millimeter platoon, where our disregard for him was no stigma, since the 81 millimeter musclemen regarded us as a bunch of eight balls anyway. Yet even then, even after we had become completely disillusioned with him, he remained a figure of wonder among us. We could scarcely believe that an impostor could be clever enough actually to invent a language -- phonics, calligraphy, and all. It had looked like Japanese and sounded like Japanese, and during his seventeen days of lecturing on that ship Whitey had carried it all in his head, remembering every variation, every subtlety, every syntactic construction. ..."

"... https://www.americanheritage.com/man-who-could-speak-japanese ..."

Sep 14, 2019 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

Wukchumni , September 13, 2019 at 4:29 pm

Re: Fake list of grunge slang:

a fabulous tale of the South Pacific by William Manchester

The Man Who Could Speak Japanese

"We wrote it down.

The next phrase was:

" ' Booki fai kiz soy ?' " said Whitey. "It means 'Do you surrender?' "

Then:

" ' Mizi pok loi ooni rak tong zin ?' 'Where are your comrades?' "

"Tong what ?" rasped the colonel.

"Tong zin , sir," our instructor replied, rolling chalk between his palms. He arched his eyebrows, as though inviting another question. There was one. The adjutant asked, "What's that gizmo on the end?"

Of course, it might have been a Japanese newspaper. Whitey's claim to be a linguist was the last of his status symbols, and he clung to it desperately. Looking back, I think his improvisations on the Morton fantail must have been one of the most heroic achievements in the history of confidence men -- which, as you may have gathered by now, was Whitey's true profession. Toward the end of our tour of duty on the 'Canal he was totally discredited with us and transferred at his own request to the 81-millimeter platoon, where our disregard for him was no stigma, since the 81 millimeter musclemen regarded us as a bunch of eight balls anyway. Yet even then, even after we had become completely disillusioned with him, he remained a figure of wonder among us. We could scarcely believe that an impostor could be clever enough actually to invent a language -- phonics, calligraphy, and all. It had looked like Japanese and sounded like Japanese, and during his seventeen days of lecturing on that ship Whitey had carried it all in his head, remembering every variation, every subtlety, every syntactic construction.

https://www.americanheritage.com/man-who-could-speak-japanese

Todd's Humor Archive If Architects Had to Work Like Programmers

Please design and build me a house. I am not sure of what I need, you should use your discretion. My house should have between two and forty-five bedrooms. Just make sure the plans are such that the bedrooms can be easily added or deleted. When you bring the blueprints to me, I will make the final decision of what I want. Also bring me the cost breakdown for each configuration so I can arbitrarily pick one.

Keep in mind that the house I ultimately choose must cost less than the one I am currently living in. Make sure, however, that you correct all the deficiencies that exist in my current house (the floor of my kitchen vibrates when I walk across it and the walls don't have nearly enough insulation in them.)

As you design, also keep in mind that I want to keep yearly maintenance cost as low as possible. This should mean the incorporation of extra-cost features like aluminum, vinyl, or composite siding. (If you chose not to specify aluminum, be prepared to explain your decision in detail.)

Please take care that the modern design practices and the latest materials are used in the construction of the house, as I want it to be a showplace for the most up-to-date ideas and methods. Be alerted however, that the kitchen should be designed to accommodate, among other things, my 1952 Gibson refrigerator.

To insure that you are building the correct house for my entire family, make certain that you contact each of my children and also my in-laws. My mother-in-law will have very strong feelings about how the house should be designed, since she visits us at least once a year. Make sure that you weigh all these options carefully and come to the right decision. I, however, retain the right to overrule any choices you make.

Please don't bother me with small details right now. Your job is to develop the overall plans for the house, get the big picture. At this time, for example, it is not appropriate to be choosing the color of the carpet. Keep in mind, however that my wife likes blue.

Also do not worry at this time about acquiring the resources to build the house itself. Your first priority is to develop detailed plans and specifications. Once I approve these plans, however, I would expect the house to be under construction within 48 hours.

While you are designing this house specifically for me, keep in mind that sooner or later I will have to sell it to someone else. It therefore should appeal to a wide variety of potential buyers. Please make sure before you finalize the plans that there is a consensus of the population in my area that they like the features this house has.

I can advise you to run up and look at my neighbor's house he constructed last year. We like it a great deal. It has many of the features that we would also like in our new home, particularly the 75-foot swimming pool. With careful engineering, I believe that you can design this into our new house without impacting the final cost.

Please prepare a complete set of blueprints. It is not necessary at this time to do the real design, since they will be used for construction bids. Be advised, however, that you will be held accountable for any increase of construction costs as a result of later design changes.

You must be thrilled to be working on as interesting a project as this! To be able to use the latest techniques and materials and to be given such freedom in your designs is something that can't happen very often. Contact me as soon as possible with your complete ideas and plans.

PS My wife has just told me that she disagrees with many of the instructions I've given you in this letter. As architect, it is your responsibility to resolve these differences. I have tried in the past and have been unable to accomplish this. If you can't handle the responsibility, I will have to find another architect.

PPS Perhaps what I need is not a house at all, but a travel trailer. Please advise me as soon as possible if this is the case.

The story of Mel

Maybe they do now, in this decadent era of Lite beer, hand calculators and "user-friendly" software but back in the Good Old Days, when the term "software" sounded funny and Real Computers were made out of drums and vacuum tubes, Real Programmers wrote in machine code. Not Fortran. Not RATFOR. Not, even, assembly language. Machine Code.Raw, unadorned, inscrutable hexadecimal numbers. Directly.

Lest a whole new generation of programmers grow up in ignorance of this glorious past, I feel duty-bound to describe, as best I can through the generation gap, how a Real Programmer wrote code. I'll call him Mel, because that was his name.

I first met Mel when I went to work for Royal McBee Computer Corp., a now-defunct subsidiary of the typewriter company. The firm manufactured the LGP-30, a small, cheap (by the standards of the day) drum-memory computer, and had just started to manufacture the RPC-4000, a much-improved, bigger, better, faster -- drum-memory computer. Cores cost too much, and weren't here to stay, anyway. (That's why you haven't heard of the company, or the computer.)

I had been hired to write a Fortran compiler for this new marvel and Mel was my guide to its wonders. Mel didn't approve of compilers.

"If a program can't rewrite its own code," he asked, "what good is it?"

... ... ...

Todd's Humor Archive Computer Engineers and Managers

Date: Mon, 30 Sep 1996 23:17:12 -0700 (PDT)
From: Gary <[email protected]>
To: [email protected]
Cc: [email protected]
Subject: Engineers

A Software Engineer, a Hardware Engineer and a Departmental Manager were on their way to a meeting in Switzerland. They were driving down a steep mountain road when suddenly the brakes on their car failed. The car careened almost out of control down the road, bouncing off the crash barriers, until it miraculously ground to a halt, scraping along the mountainside. The car's occupants, shaken but unhurt, now had a problem: they were stuck halfway down a mountain in a car with no brakes. What were they to do?

"I know," said the Departmental Manager, "Let's have a meeting, propose a Vision, formulate a Mission Statement, define some Goals, and by a process of Continuous Improvement find a solution to the Critical Problems, and we can be on our way."

"No, no," said the Hardware Engineer, "That will take far too long, and besides, that method has never worked before. I've got my Swiss Army knife with me, and in no time at all I can strip down the car's braking system, isolate the fault, fix it, and we can be on our way."

"Well," said the Software Engineer, "Before we do anything, I think we should push the car back up the road and see if it happens again."

(Thanks to Tomasz Mazur at VDOnet for forwarding this.)

So you want to marry a software engineer

@ Jokes

1) What quality do you value most in your partner?
a) A sense of humor
b) Emotional maturity.
c) High bandwidth.

2) When you get home at the end of the day, you like to:
a) Turn on the Silicon Valley Business report, and eat dinner.
b) Hook up to your ISP, and check out the hit count on your web page.
c) Recharge your cell phone, laptop, and wireless modem, change batteries on your pager, and resynchronize your Palm Pilot and home computer.

3) Your ideal partner is:
a) Interesting and attractive.
b) Emotionally mature and understanding.
c) Extensible and polymorphic.

4) In spiritually difficult times, you often turn to:
a) Dilbert
b) Kernighan and Ritchie
c) comp.lang.c++

5) If go over to your partner's place and think it's a mess, you would:
a) Complain to him/her, and tell them to tidy up.
b) Call a maid service.
c) Make clean

6) What kind of car would you like to buy next, and why?
a) A BMW, because people will see that I am rich and successful.
b) A Jeep, because it's youthful, rugged, and won't break down.
c) A Honda because the engine control computer can be hacked for more horsepower.

7) Name the 4 essential food groups:
a) Fruit, vegetables, meat, dairy.
b) Coffee, chocolate, takeout, ice cream.
c) rec.food.cooking, rec.food.veg, ba.food, alt.food.chocolate

8) You like to travel with your partner because:
a) You share new experiences together.
b) You learn about each other in different situations.
c) You get more use out of your wireless modem.

9) You think a relationship is ready for a permanent commitment because:
a) You've successfully struggled through several years of good and bad times.
b) You're already living together, so you might as well tie the knot.
c) You finally got your local network configured just right.

10) If you and your partner got married, you would want to:
a) Keep your last name.
b) Change your last name.
c) Combine your names with a hyphen.
d) Combine your names with an underscore.

11) You and your partner think it's time to have children when:
a) Your stock options are vested.
b) You've agreed on the requirements and design.
c) You've come up with a good naming convention.
d) You really understand the use of multiple inheritance.

Recommended Links

Softpanorama Recommended

Top articles

Sites

Etc

Society

Groupthink : Two Party System as Polyarchy : Corruption of Regulators : Bureaucracies : Understanding Micromanagers and Control Freaks : Toxic Managers :   Harvard Mafia : Diplomatic Communication : Surviving a Bad Performance Review : Insufficient Retirement Funds as Immanent Problem of Neoliberal Regime : PseudoScience : Who Rules America : Neoliberalism  : The Iron Law of Oligarchy : Libertarian Philosophy

Quotes

War and Peace : Skeptical Finance : John Kenneth Galbraith :Talleyrand : Oscar Wilde : Otto Von Bismarck : Keynes : George Carlin : Skeptics : Propaganda  : SE quotes : Language Design and Programming Quotes : Random IT-related quotes :  Somerset Maugham : Marcus Aurelius : Kurt Vonnegut : Eric Hoffer : Winston Churchill : Napoleon Bonaparte : Ambrose Bierce :  Bernard Shaw : Mark Twain Quotes

Bulletin:

Vol 25, No.12 (December, 2013) Rational Fools vs. Efficient Crooks The efficient markets hypothesis : Political Skeptic Bulletin, 2013 : Unemployment Bulletin, 2010 :  Vol 23, No.10 (October, 2011) An observation about corporate security departments : Slightly Skeptical Euromaydan Chronicles, June 2014 : Greenspan legacy bulletin, 2008 : Vol 25, No.10 (October, 2013) Cryptolocker Trojan (Win32/Crilock.A) : Vol 25, No.08 (August, 2013) Cloud providers as intelligence collection hubs : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2010 : Inequality Bulletin, 2009 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2008 : Copyleft Problems Bulletin, 2004 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2011 : Energy Bulletin, 2010 : Malware Protection Bulletin, 2010 : Vol 26, No.1 (January, 2013) Object-Oriented Cult : Political Skeptic Bulletin, 2011 : Vol 23, No.11 (November, 2011) Softpanorama classification of sysadmin horror stories : Vol 25, No.05 (May, 2013) Corporate bullshit as a communication method  : Vol 25, No.06 (June, 2013) A Note on the Relationship of Brooks Law and Conway Law

History:

Fifty glorious years (1950-2000): the triumph of the US computer engineering : Donald Knuth : TAoCP and its Influence of Computer Science : Richard Stallman : Linus Torvalds  : Larry Wall  : John K. Ousterhout : CTSS : Multix OS Unix History : Unix shell history : VI editor : History of pipes concept : Solaris : MS DOS :  Programming Languages History : PL/1 : Simula 67 : C : History of GCC development :  Scripting Languages : Perl history   : OS History : Mail : DNS : SSH : CPU Instruction Sets : SPARC systems 1987-2006 : Norton Commander : Norton Utilities : Norton Ghost : Frontpage history : Malware Defense History : GNU Screen : OSS early history

Classic books:

The Peter Principle : Parkinson Law : 1984 : The Mythical Man-Month :  How to Solve It by George Polya : The Art of Computer Programming : The Elements of Programming Style : The Unix Hater’s Handbook : The Jargon file : The True Believer : Programming Pearls : The Good Soldier Svejk : The Power Elite

Most popular humor pages:

Manifest of the Softpanorama IT Slacker Society : Ten Commandments of the IT Slackers Society : Computer Humor Collection : BSD Logo Story : The Cuckoo's Egg : IT Slang : C++ Humor : ARE YOU A BBS ADDICT? : The Perl Purity Test : Object oriented programmers of all nations : Financial Humor : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2008 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2010 : The Most Comprehensive Collection of Editor-related Humor : Programming Language Humor : Goldman Sachs related humor : Greenspan humor : C Humor : Scripting Humor : Real Programmers Humor : Web Humor : GPL-related Humor : OFM Humor : Politically Incorrect Humor : IDS Humor : "Linux Sucks" Humor : Russian Musical Humor : Best Russian Programmer Humor : Microsoft plans to buy Catholic Church : Richard Stallman Related Humor : Admin Humor : Perl-related Humor : Linus Torvalds Related humor : PseudoScience Related Humor : Networking Humor : Shell Humor : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2011 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2012 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2013 : Java Humor : Software Engineering Humor : Sun Solaris Related Humor : Education Humor : IBM Humor : Assembler-related Humor : VIM Humor : Computer Viruses Humor : Bright tomorrow is rescheduled to a day after tomorrow : Classic Computer Humor

The Last but not Least Technology is dominated by two types of people: those who understand what they do not manage and those who manage what they do not understand ~Archibald Putt. Ph.D

The statements, views and opinions presented on this web page are those of the author (or referenced source) and are not endorsed by, nor do they necessarily reflect, the opinions of the Softpanorama society. We do not warrant the correctness of the information provided or its fitness for any purpose. The site uses AdSense so you need to be aware of Google privacy policy. You you do not want to be tracked by Google please disable Javascript for this site. This site is perfectly usable without Javascript.

Last modified: July 02, 2020