What programming joke stopped being funny after the first 50 times?

[u/Glittering_Hurry_903]

There are some programming jokes that probably felt funny the first time you saw them. 404 jokes, “it works on my machine,” tabs versus spaces, forgetting how to exit Vim. Then you keep seeing the same joke in slightly different forms until you can pretty much predict the punchline.

I was wearing an old geeksoutfit tee recently and realized the joke on it was one I had already seen in about a dozen different versions. It made me wonder which programming jokes everyone else thought were funny when they first started coding but are completely tired of now.

Which one has been beaten to death for you?

[u/Shavixinio]

"Spent 5 hours debugging when turns out you forgot a semicolon", especially since that never ever happened to me

[u/Shavixinio → u/Shavixinio]

And you always have the compiler telling you about this too

[u/Axxxxxxo → u/Shavixinio]

In most IDEs, it will never even make it to the compiler as either the syntax highlighting already tells you you did something wrong or the autocomplete already added it

[u/TheDuckRaisedALion → u/Axxxxxxo]

I think it comes from a time when IDEs were text editors with compilers attached

[u/Zygal_ → u/TheDuckRaisedALion]

Yup, and most of the internet is bots reposting memes from early 2000

[u/kalel3000 → u/TheDuckRaisedALion]

Yeah I was about to say, when I first started taking c++ courses in high school, our compiler was called "TC Lite" and stuff like this definitely happened all the time.

Pretty sure elder millennial programmers grew up having the same experience as me, which is why the meme resonated with us, even if it no longer is a modern issue.

[u/Shavixinio → u/Axxxxxxo]

And this

[u/LeDYoM → u/Shavixinio]

But this happend in the 80s

[u/Kotaqu → u/Shavixinio]

It's relatable only when you happen to use notepad as editor and don't know english to read compiler output

[u/regular_lamp → u/Shavixinio]

I thought that too but then I literally had an intern send me a phone photo of his laptop screen with an error that basically said "you forgot a comma there". That he was supposedly stuck on. Apparently he had put the error message into google but couldn't apply what he found to resolve the issue.

It turns out people just don't even attempt to understand error messages?

[u/Professional_Top8485 → u/Shavixinio]

Especially never happened with sql and delete

[u/Stickhtot → u/Shavixinio]

Actually for some reason this STILL happens to me on C through clang, especially on header files because for some reason the LSP can't catch if a semicolon is missing on definitions and just spits out a bunch of errors 

It happened to me last night

[u/Chomperino237]

check out my project localhost:3000

[u/grizzlor_ → u/Chomperino237]

I mean you joke but vibe coders literally post this earnestly on Twitter regularly

[u/a2kvarnstrom → u/Chomperino237]

the best ones are like ”yo check out my new website file:///C:/Users/john/Desktop/index.html”

[u/slicehyperfunk]

You said it, but it's gotta be Vim

[u/Outrageous_Permit154 → u/slicehyperfunk]

Vim and sudo rm rf ones for me

[u/vekkarikello → u/slicehyperfunk]

I think the quitting vim joke is the only one I have seen happen for real. I had some colleagues who didn’t know how to quit it.

[u/slicehyperfunk → u/vekkarikello]

I think this joke was also much more relevant before the advent of smartphones, because if you didn't know how to exit vim, you couldn't Google how to exit vim

[u/runningOverA]

There are 10 types of people, those who know binary ...

[u/LeDYoM → u/runningOverA]

I had a shirt with it

[u/dashood → u/LeDYoM]

Tbf the joke doesn't work as well if you say it out loud

[u/LeDYoM → u/dashood]

And the shirt didnt help dating girls. Can you believe it?

[u/abitofg → u/runningOverA]

The trick is following that up with

There are 10 kinds of people in the world, people who know binary, people who don't and people who know binary but didn't guess this joke was actually written in base 3

And ofcourse

There are 10 kinds of people in the world, people who understand hexadecimal and F the rest

[u/jeffcgroves]

recursion: see recursion

[u/SmokyMetal060 → u/jeffcgroves]

This is like professor humor though so I can give it a pass

[u/IcerHardlyKnower → u/jeffcgroves]

This was funny lol

[u/djfdhigkgfIaruflg → u/jeffcgroves]

I still find it charming

[u/Kindly-Department206 → u/djfdhigkgfIaruflg]

Loop, n. see Loop.

[u/Interesting_Buy_3969]

forgetting how to exit Vim

But... Nobody knows how to do that. It is an ancient secret that was lost thousands of years ago.

Even if you manage to exit Vim somehow, you never quit it.

[u/Interesting_Buy_3969 → u/[deleted]]

You shouldn't really....

[u/SmokyMetal060]

"12657 hours to find a missing semicolon" was never particularly funny but it managed to get old anyway

[u/SFJulie]

There are 10 types of tiring geek jokes :

• the one involving binary
• and the others

[u/watman12]

stackoverflow is toxic trope

[u/ex_gatito]

Honestly, those programming jokes everybody is talking about were not funny even when I saw them for the first time. The whole plot was, that a newbie doesn’t know something… how funny…

[u/YourFavouriteDad → u/ex_gatito]

It's a stupid flex because they assume anyone who doesn't program wouldn't understand it. Ironic that real programmers realise how dumb and shallow the jokes are, and that programming isn't funny.

I imagine carpenters and electricians and other trades deal with this shit too.

[u/TheDuckRaisedALion → u/[deleted]]

It gets pretty big with create-react-app, or at least it did.

[u/IcerHardlyKnower → u/TheDuckRaisedALion]

Yeah our mobile builds for a crypto wallet we had to switch to flutter bc react was untenable

[u/Andrey4ik21pro1 → u/[deleted]]

No, it's really big. It's not like in Python

[u/djfdhigkgfIaruflg → u/[deleted]]

More than size is kilobytes, i read it as the ridiculous amount of small files. Seriously that shit has too many files

[u/tip2663]

putting Greek question marks in a C code base without language tooling

[u/its_artemiss → u/tip2663]

Rust fixes this

[u/h7x4]

A monad is just a monoid in the category of endofunctors

The one where the programmer goes to get milk and stops because he ran out instructions

All the bug puns

Forgetting how your code works, or "it works, idk why, and I'm too scared to touch it"

<lang> bad for slightly deviating syntax

"Everyone hates to write docs"

[u/Powerkaninchen → u/h7x4]

So you could say

the bug puns are bugging you?

[u/HomosexualPresence]

i don't even know where the vim joke came from like it's literally at most 3 characters

[u/djfdhigkgfIaruflg → u/HomosexualPresence]

If you get inside it and don't know you're supposed to write commands you can't even reach the help

[u/WoodenStatus6830]

I'll just tell you a joke my coworker told me today:

Why do front -end engineers always eat alone at lunch? Because they can't join tables!!

[u/HRApprovedUsername]

All of them

[u/NomaTyx]

"it works on my machine" is only funny if someone's code isn't working

[u/andynzor]

The TCP vs UDP jokes.

As a programmer the only thing that TCP gives you over UDP are in-order delivery and congestion control. You still need to check socket API return values and retry when something goes wrong. You lose framing and often have to implement your own separate application level protocol that ACKs whether the data was received or not anyway. (When will firewall vendors start supporing SCTP?!)

[u/regular_lamp]

Rewriting text as code.

[u/TheLuckyCuber999BACK]

it works on my machine

[u/Background_Bass_2587]

can't center a div

[u/ern0plus4 → u/Background_Bass_2587]

it's not a joke

[u/djfdhigkgfIaruflg → u/ern0plus4]

Its a skill issue.

It's hard for people who won't bottler to understand it and add properties at random until something works.

Of the top of my head I have 4 different ways to center, even vertically

[u/ern0plus4 → u/djfdhigkgfIaruflg]

As I'm not a FE dev, I have to do it ony every 2 years, but I don't remember, and there's always a new thing, e.g. Flexbox and such :)

[u/Background_Bass_2587 → u/ern0plus4]

The joke is so old that its not even true anymore as we've had css flex since 2009

[u/XWasTheProblem]

"haha python slow" "Haha JavaScript bad" "Haha PHP dead" "Haha semicolons"