this post was submitted on 14 Jul 2023
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Programmer Humor

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The history of computers and software is full of nerdy and obscure jokes well beyond the caricatures of exiting vim. Complier compiler (explain that to most people!) to yet another compiler compiler to bison is one of those.

What are your favourite obscure computer nerd jokes?

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[–] [email protected] 23 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Not so much of a joke as a cute story. There was once a programmer with a dog named Biff who would bark at the mailman every time he delivered the mail. The programmer wrote a program to monitor incoming email and beep when you got a message, and named it biff.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago

GNU's Not UNIX

PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor

WINE Is Not an Emulator

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago

Less is more.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago

my favorite name origin for a bit of software relates to the text editor nano. nano was written as a standalone clone of Pico, as a play on metric prefixes, but Pico is actually Pine compositor, part of Pine, an email client. Pine itself was based on an earlier email client called Elm, and has been attributed as various recursive acronyms such as 'Pine Is Nearly Elm'

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

A real-life moth was found to be the cause of errors in a computer, popularizing the terms "bug" and "debugging". The culprit was attached to the report as proof:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debugging#/media/File%3AFirst_Computer_Bug%2C_1945.jpg

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

While the story is true, it’s not the origin of the terms “bug” and “debugging.” Those terms were already in use in Edison’s time.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

Yes, that's what the page I linked to says, and why I said "popularized" and not "originated".

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

TWAIN, the protocol used in fax machines, comes from Technology Without An Interesting Name.

Edit: aww, wikipedia says that's a myth. I'm leaving it here because it's too good not to be true.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago

Never ever let facts get in the way of a good story!

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

PCMCIA: People Can't Memorize Computer Industry Acronyms

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

What? and I am a programmer 😅

[–] [email protected] 34 points 1 year ago

Compiler compiler (cc) -> yet another compiler compiler (yacc) -> bison (because yacc sounds like "yak")

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

cat (as in concatenate)
prints a file to stdout

head & tail print the beginning / end of a file

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