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language agnostic - What's your favorite "programmer" cartoon? - Stack Overflow

Clipped from: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/84556/whats-your-favorite-programmer-cartoon

838 favorite
1812

Personally I like this one:

alt text

P.S. Do not hotlink the cartoon without the site's permission please.

218  
It's unfortunate that it prints it out without line breaks. –  PintSizedCat Sep 17 '08 at 15:35
19  
Can you PLEASE take this stuff to www.reddit.com. It has no business here. Do not turn this site into a newsgroup please. –  TheSoftwareJedi Oct 2 '08 at 17:00
10  
rolleyes main() in C has to return an int, and returning 0 indicate sucessful termination. –  KTC Oct 15 '08 at 10:19
7  
It's perfectly legal C. What would be incorrect would be "void main(void)". –  Joe Pineda Oct 29 '08 at 20:37
12  
If everything was fair game the site would be a digg/forum clone. But since it's a programming question and answer site, some discipline has to be exerted over articles that have a lot of views. Naked pictures with programming code on it, would get a lot of views, but what does that really say? –  Mark Rogers Feb 6 '09 at 22:02
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193 Answers

1810 accepted

Another one from xkcd Exploits of a Mom

community wiki

18  
I have half the mind to give my sone the same middle name. ;) –  Haacked Sep 17 '08 at 16:04
137  
My last name has an apostrophe in it. I feel like lil bobby tables half the time since 50% of what's written out there breaks on apostrophes. –  William OConnor - csevb10 Sep 18 '08 at 0:19
212  
We ran across a Mary Null once that reeked havoc on a legacy system of ours.... Too many LastName != 'Null' conditions... –  Bloodhound Sep 18 '08 at 12:26
108  
William, your comment is particularly ironic given how your name shows up here. –  A. Rex Sep 23 '08 at 0:54
20  
I was thinking to call my future kid 'Null Pointer Exception'. My girlfriend isn't too hot on the idea though. –  christian studer Feb 4 '09 at 9:02
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1369

22  
Does anyone know who's the author? –  tamersalama Oct 4 '08 at 18:31
4  
I don't think it has a single author. I have seen a version with only 4 frames in about 1992. –  Eggs McLaren Oct 24 '08 at 6:24
4  
I actually found this printed on a t-shirt back in the '70s. It was only 4 in the series back then, but I bought the one with the two ropes on either side of the trunk (no cutout). ;-) -R –  Huntrods Nov 6 '08 at 0:12
27  
6  
It's been traced back to 1970 in books - but it was a well known old joke then so might be 50years older. See businessballs.com/treeswing.htm –  Martin Beckett Oct 5 '09 at 20:20
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937

I like this one: http://xkcd.com/149/

alt text

(Proper User Policy apparently means Simon Says.)

14  
this is a sysadmin cartoon :-) –  Cristian Ciupitu Sep 18 '08 at 8:37
28  
To explain the humor, its easy to forget you do not normally have the privilege to do things like mount a new drive or use a package manager to install new programs. My console sessions always look like "mount somedrive" "[You must be a superuser to do that]" "sudo mount somedrive" "[done]" –  Jimmy Nov 20 '08 at 22:32
14  
I didn't understand it, untill I used Ubuntu for two weeks. –  Eibx Mar 13 '09 at 15:00
10  
I actually wrote a program on Ubuntu called make-me-a-sandwich. If you run it without root access, it will output "What? Make it yourself", but if run with root, "Okay." :p –  DeadHead Jul 21 '09 at 5:18
14  
for all those who think you have to retype the entire command: sudo !! will rerun the previous command with sudo prepended. –  Cryophallion Jan 18 '10 at 22:51
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805

enter image description here

77  
It's funny because it's true. So, very, true. "Why can't we hide this field by default?" > "Because it's mandatory." > "Why is it mandatory?" > "Because the customer might need it later if they buy this other module we have." > eye-stab –  Joeri Sebrechts Sep 27 '08 at 11:43
145  
hmmm... who gave you permission to use our company's screenshot ?? –  Newtopian Apr 14 '09 at 2:30
4  
wow, that book's website sucks --^ Seriously, frames which grab pages from unrelated domains? –  thomasrutter Jun 3 '09 at 3:58
10  
So ... Apple and Google products are simpler because they don't deal with personal information? –  Alec Sep 5 '09 at 17:43
22  
Apple and Google products are simpler because they don't have to deal with a business process. –  Robert Harvey♦ Oct 18 '09 at 20:30
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746

The only valid measurement of code quality: WTFs/minute

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32  
Didn't Joel actually tell a story about Bill gates and his 'fuck count'? –  Treb Oct 8 '08 at 12:32
9  
@Treb, yeah, it's called "My First BillG Review" at joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/06/16.html. –  Robert Gamble Nov 1 '08 at 19:53
6  
I have actually used WTF/M as a metric when looking over a legacy system designed by a less than talented developer –  Neil Aitken Jan 13 '09 at 13:20
4  
Used in Clean Code by Uncle Bob –  Ruben Bartelink May 8 '09 at 23:47
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WTF = Where's The Formatting ;) –  Sk93 Aug 4 '09 at 21:35
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678

I wrote a production website that has the path /dev/random/ return 4 because of this comic.

int get_rand_number(){ return 4;}

89  
wow. compromising production applications in the name of humor... .. i like it! –  stephenbayer Sep 20 '08 at 15:51
7  
It hardly "compromised" the system. It was a Ruby on Rails application so I just created an additional route and an action in frontpage controller. :) –  epochwolf Sep 23 '08 at 15:55
5  
This was because of Debian's early 2008 bug :P –  igorgue Dec 4 '08 at 16:43
9  
If you ask the GNU C++ for DOS compiler for the process ID, it always returns 42. –  Eric J. Aug 14 '09 at 3:00
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671

I've always found this one rather obligatory 8^D:

52  
It scares me that this describes my day-job! –  Mitchel Sellers Sep 17 '08 at 15:48
18  
turtles all the way down... :) –  jop Sep 17 '08 at 17:31
4  
oh so true, and sadly so. –  Calanus Feb 4 '09 at 15:15
2  
i've had this soooo many times with customers! lol –  nbolton Mar 19 '09 at 17:40
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616

My favourite Dilbert of all time.

I think mauve has the most RAM.

1  
Oh my God...I'm laughing by 5 minutes now... –  luiss Oct 17 '08 at 15:10
42  
Perhaps I should ask SO which color has the most RAM... –  Jon Smock Nov 9 '08 at 3:32
4  
laugh not laff (comments need to be at least 15 characters long so I'm typing this in parenthesis to meet this strange requirement) –  Bambax May 5 '09 at 9:18
12  
We should use XML. –  Kalmi Oct 16 '09 at 0:27
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599

XKCD Comic 303 - "Compiling"

('Are you stealing those LCDs?' 'Yeah, but I'm doing it while my code compiles')

I have this one pinned to the wall facing the entrance to our office :)

community wiki

3  
Can you please add a link to the original site, which includes the title, and Randalls alt-text commentary? See creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.5 for the license. Thanks. –  etchasketch Sep 17 '08 at 22:58
4  
I have this shirt. :D –  TraumaPony Sep 20 '08 at 14:20
2  
I have time to post a comment because my code is compiling! –  Diego Deberdt Jan 22 '09 at 14:12
49  
The only reason NOT to use dynamic languages! –  abyx Feb 9 '09 at 11:28
2  
There should be a follow-up for databasefolk such as myself: "My query's executing" –  Gausie Dec 7 '09 at 11:13
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545

261  
Worth noting that the spike appears between 1.2 and 1.4, closer to 1.4. Specifically, the spike is at .1337 :D –  Asmor Sep 19 '08 at 13:28
28  
Randall Munroe, the creator of xkcd, discusses how he actually tested this theory during a talk at Google: youtube.com/watch?v=zJOS0sV2a24 -- start at 8:26 or so. The talk is also exciting because Donald Knuth asks the first question! –  A. Rex Sep 23 '08 at 1:07
1  
I've found exactly the same effect with playing pool in a pub. Substitute programming skill with pool-shark factor and I've been there :) –  Drew Gibson Nov 8 '08 at 18:20
7  
printing, and leaving on the boss's desk as we speak. –  GordonB Feb 26 '09 at 8:31
5  
Apparently this carton formed the the complete basis for the plot of the movie Swordfish. –  RBarryYoung Sep 24 '09 at 6:04
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522

community wiki

81  
Because random raptor attacks are something everyone should worry about. –  Keithius Oct 1 '08 at 21:03
7  
+1. I found a GOTO in some C# code just last week! Where do we find these contractors??? –  CodingWithSpike Jan 12 '09 at 23:30
9  
LOL. Was horrified ~10 years ago when the linux kernel hackers added gotos into "my" (ok, the huge company I work for's) driver. Got used to it though. Don't hate gotos instinctively anymore. Even use them sometimes. Good enough for Linus, good enough for me. –  smcameron Jun 19 '09 at 4:09
12  
5  
@Jahanzeb Farooq -- Reference to Jurassic Park and chaotic systems -- read the book or see the movie. –  Hogan Jan 24 '10 at 18:10
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509

76  
have to say I've done that. –  WalterJ89 Feb 23 '09 at 8:54
6  
I printed this off at my last job, and kept it by my desk, and when ever my boss asked for a change like that i use to refer to that cartoon to the other employees. (yes i use to work in a real life dilbert office) –  Audioillity Jun 12 '09 at 10:47
10  
Date sback to the Cavendish lab in the 1920s - they added a multiturn vernier potentiometer to all experiments to give Rutherford (a notorius destroyer of experiments) something to fiddle with. The point being it wasn't ever connected to anything. –  Martin Beckett Oct 5 '09 at 20:24
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487

Oh! There can be only one:

It's sooo funny, because it's true :)

7  
Classic, I love this one. :) –  chaiguy Dec 24 '08 at 5:19
3  
I sent this one to a couple of friends to ... uhm... hilight their compulsive correcting tendencies. Guess what? Didn't work. haha. –  slothbear Feb 8 '09 at 2:21
94  
not programming related –  User4748402 Feb 22 '09 at 11:42
18  
This is indeed Stackoverflow... –  Curt Sampson May 23 '09 at 6:28
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475

alt text

community wiki

6  
Man, I wish I could save the day with Perl. –  Dave Sep 23 '08 at 21:32
193  
I wore this shirt to work one day, and someone asks me, staring at their screen and apparently not having noticed my wardrobe, "DOES ANYBODY KNOW REGULAR EXPRESSIONS!?" It was a heroic moment. –  Robert Elwell Oct 8 '08 at 15:11
17  
After reading this I actually learnt regular expressions, just so I could use that line. –  Neil Aitken Jan 13 '09 at 13:26
8  
An Algorithms and Data Structures teacher once rephrased this as the "fun roommate" problem: what do you do the night your roommate removes all the punctuation and spaces from your senior thesis to be "funny"? –  Peter Nore Mar 30 '09 at 4:09
54  
@Myer - I'd just get the latest version back out of SVN... –  BenAlabaster Apr 16 '09 at 19:19
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455

About Agile Programming, Makes me laff every time.

27  
The FRASCATI technique - Forget Requirements and Analysis Start Coding And Then Implement. I actually have this on my CV and am dying for an interviewer to ask what it is. –  PhoebeB Oct 17 '09 at 10:43
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445

Not a cartoon per se, but still good:

43  
Bugs have 6 legs - but maybe it's a bug... –  sdfx Feb 6 '09 at 19:38
23  
In early versions of Minesweeper, you could pause the game by hitting Esc - the window would minimize and the clock pause. In Windows 2000 the clock would stop but the window would remain, so you could play out the game and your time would be whatever the clock said right now. It was obviously a bug but Microsoft documented it as if it was a feature. –  Hugh Allen May 15 '09 at 2:26
20  
@hugh: unfortunately, this feature has been removed in Windows 7. Should I open a bug report? –  configurator Jun 11 '09 at 1:31
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417

Dilbert's random number generator.

17  
I think that particular RNG was featured in a Beatles song. –  joshperry May 27 '09 at 23:21
2  
actually it was beethoven... –  Gnark Sep 8 '09 at 12:17
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1  
@Douglas: Thanks, that link ended up to be an hour and 20 minutes of Math on Wikipedia. :p –  Josso Dec 12 '10 at 16:05
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389

This has actually happened to me. A boss mistook my resourcefulness in scripting for laziness. link

alt text

UPDATE: link to original. Sorry about that.

community wiki

11  
A common problem when working with non technical managers.... –  Mitchel Sellers Sep 17 '08 at 15:48
8  
Any task that can be automated in a timely fashion ought to be automated! –  Jon Ball Sep 18 '08 at 1:43
140  
Laziness is one of a programmer's greatest virtues :) –  Thomas Sep 18 '08 at 3:27
16  
i had a boss that used to say that "google is for lazy people".. –  VP. Oct 13 '08 at 18:55
25  
i literally got fired for doing this lol –  nbolton Mar 19 '09 at 17:46
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388

Religious debates are always fun!

40  
The original XKCD alt text for this comic is: "Real programmers set the universal constants at the start such that the universe evolves to contain a disk with the data they want." –  Pat Notz Sep 20 '08 at 10:28
4  
Vi vs. emacs... here's an entire video game I wrote that is nothing but a big joke about the (switch to somber jedi voice) emacs vi flamewars. wordwarvi.sourceforge.net –  smcameron Jun 19 '09 at 4:18
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341

This one from 1995, still one of best.

Computer holy wars

8  
awesome. awesome to the max. –  Jake McGraw Sep 18 '08 at 12:52
1  
Ahh, the best... strokes goatee knowingly... JB –  Jonathan Bourke Sep 18 '08 at 15:03
2  
Dang my uselessness at growing beards!! –  Hyposaurus Nov 12 '08 at 4:02
1  
I just failed a statistics class from a professor just like that. –  Shadow Apr 29 '09 at 20:40
1  
Heh, came here to psot this. –  smcameron Jun 19 '09 at 4:49
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331

alt text

31  
This is the ideal world where devs are looking for bugs. Test should be out there holding the mouse by the tail while dev is in the corner building something with tinker-toys. –  Aaron Sep 18 '08 at 16:17
2  
image is missing, photobucket killed it –  drye Sep 30 '08 at 17:52
1  
Wow, it's awesome. That's what I'm really feel as being a developer. –  Ahmed Mar 5 '09 at 14:28
1  
Had this one as my background. :D –  Arnis L. May 13 '09 at 14:26
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297

Of course, xkcd!

353

65  
This has found it's way into Python's source code: svn.python.org/view/python/trunk/Lib/… –  rossp Nov 11 '08 at 6:00
14  
Well, as of Python 3, it's print("Hello, world!"). –  Cristián Romo Jan 1 '09 at 5:33
15  
The weird thing is that every actual Python feature mentioned in this carton actually also worked in BASIC 30 years ago. –  RBarryYoung Sep 24 '09 at 6:30
26  
Including anti-gravity? –  Martin Beckett Oct 5 '09 at 20:27
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285
community wiki

1  
We call that "hand waving" here at work. –  unclerojelio Jan 22 '09 at 18:05
36  
I got 7 / 10 on a proof in undergrad discrete mathematics using this technique... –  Ian McLaird Feb 16 '09 at 15:18
6  
Quote: "What’s your favorite PROGRAMMER cartoon?" –  Camilo Martin Dec 8 '09 at 12:56
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282

alt text

community wiki

4  
I wish I can vote you twice, best thing in a while –  Eduardo Mar 23 '09 at 20:02
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Not really programming though, but still good. –  Artem Russakovskii May 10 '09 at 6:38
2  
somebody explain the meaning plz –  Avadhesh Oct 26 '10 at 7:36
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261

alt text

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Love the double reference! –  unclerojelio Jan 22 '09 at 18:03
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+1 for the double reference! –  Clay Nichols Jan 29 '09 at 2:58
1  
Where's the double reference? I only see the "A new hope one" –  Federico Giorgi Nov 27 '09 at 17:15
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255

Agile Programming Methods:

14  
dilbert's boss shrunk? –  Kevin Conner Sep 18 '08 at 3:20
2  
Stuck this on my PM's wall lol –  danswain Feb 4 '09 at 23:31
246

I knew it was true. XKCD #224

"We lost the documentation on quantum mechanics. You'll have to decode the regexes yourself."

community wiki

16  
"We lost the documentation on quantum mechanics. You'll have to decode the regexes yourself." –  JK. Sep 17 '08 at 16:56
2  
I especially like the last sentence. –  Brad Gilbert Sep 22 '08 at 19:58
6  
That would be the punchline then? ;) –  Benjol Sep 30 '08 at 11:30
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244

Baseline Expectations

Taken from Dilbert.com, Sept 12 2008

1  
+1 : This one is laminated and stuck to my monitor, it's the underlying issue with my current place of work. –  Pat Sep 23 '08 at 2:23
4  
it's the issue in many places, where the unexpected is not accounted for –  Alexandre Brisebois Sep 28 '08 at 21:10
3  
One Badass Development – Near deadline time everyone winds up going to the one badass of the company for help. In the end, the badass finds that everything that everyone else has done is crap and winds up doing the entire project by himself in a few days without sleep. –  George Aug 22 '09 at 22:18
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229

alt text

Formerly from here.

community wiki

28  
All base 10 are belong to us. –  Windows programmer Jan 8 '09 at 3:58
22  
@José, when expressed in base X notation, X is always 10, regardless of the value of X. 2 in base 2 is 10, 8 in base 8 is 10, 16 in hex is 10, everything is base 10 from the inside, by definition. –  Wedge Feb 11 '09 at 2:08
70  
This means that aliens have 10 fingers, just like us. –  tuinstoel Mar 10 '09 at 21:42
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@tuinstoel no it does not. For those that don't get it yet that's just sad; call yourself programmers. The aliens have four fingers and therefore they count by saying 1 2 3 10 we count by saying 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 so for both of us we percieve that we both use base '10' but 10(alien) != 10(human) --> 10(alien) == 4(human). I hope that makes more sense to everyone. Sorry for those who got it but i felt the desperate need to explain the wrong logic some people seem to have. –  Robert Massaioli Apr 30 '09 at 13:38
28  
@Shhnap, If you ask an alien how many fingers he/she/xyz/it has he/she/xyz/it will say 10. –  tuinstoel May 6 '09 at 9:03
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