How can you tell when a programmer has had sex?

When hes washing the pepper spray out of his eyes. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Two bytes meet. The first byte asks, Are you ill? The second byte replies, No, just feeling a bit off. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Eight bytes walk into a bar. The bartender asks, Can I get you anything? Yeah, reply the bytes. Make us a double. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Q. How did the programmer die in the shower? A. He read the shampoo bottle instructions: Lather. Rinse. Repeat. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ How many programmers does it take to change a light bulb? None Its a hardware problem ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Why do programmers always mix up Halloween and Christmas? Because Oct 31 equals Dec 25. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ There are only 10 kinds of people in this world: those who know binary and those who dont. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ A programmer walks to the butcher shop and buys a kilo of meat. An hour later he comes back upset that the butcher shortchanged him by 24 grams. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Knock, knock. Whos there? very long pause. Java. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Programming is 10% science, 20% ingenuity, and 70% getting the ingenuity to work with the science. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Programming is like sex: One mistake and you have to support it for the rest of your life. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ A man is smoking a cigarette and blowing smoke rings into the air. His girlfriend becomes irritated with the smoke and says, Cant you see the warning on the cigarette pack? Smoking is hazardous to your health! To which the man replies, I am a programmer. We dont worry about warnings; we only worry about errors. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ There are three kinds of lies: Lies, damned lies, and benchmarks. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ A programmer is walking along a beach and finds a lamp. He rubs the lamp, and a genie appears. I am the most powerful genie in the world. I can grant you any wish, but only one wish.

The programmer pulls out a map, points to it and says, Id want peace in the Middle East. The genie responds, Gee, I dont know. Those people have been fighting for millenia. I can do just about anything, but this is likely beyond my limits. The programmer then says, Well, I am a programmer, and my programs have lots of users. Please make all my users satisfied with my software and let them ask for sensible changes. At which point the genie responds, Um, let me see that map again. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ All programmers are playwrights, and all computers are lousy actors. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Have you heard about the new Cray super computer? Its so fast, it executes an infinite loop in 6 seconds. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ The generation of random numbers is too important to be left to chance. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ I just saw my life flash before my eyes and all I could see was a close tag ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ The computer is mightier than the pen, the sword, and usually, the programmer. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Debugging: Removing the needles from the haystack. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Two strings walk into a bar and sit down. The bartender says, So whatll it be? The first string says, I think Ill have a beer quag fulk boorg jdk^CjfdLk jk3s d#f67howe%^U r89nvy~~owmc63^Dz x.xvcu Please excuse my friend, the second string says, He isnt null-terminated. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ From the Random Shack Data Processing Dictionary: Endless Loop: n., see Loop, Endless. Loop, Endless: n., see Endless Loop. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ The three most dangerous things in the world are a programmer with a soldering iron, a hardware engineer with a software patch, and a user with an idea. The Wizardry Compiled by Rick Cook ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ One hundred little One hundred little Fix a bug, link the One hundred little bugs in the code bugs. fix in, bugs in the code.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ A computer science student is studying under a tree and another pulls up on a flashy new bike. The first student asks, Whered you get that? The student on the bike replies, While I was studying outside, a beautiful girl pulled up on her bike. She took off all her clothes and said, You can have anything you want.

The first student responds, Good choice! Her clothes probably wouldnt have fit you. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ CIA Computer Industry Acronyms CD-ROM: Consumer Device, Rendered Obsolete in Months PCMCIA: People Cant Memorize Computer Industry Acronyms ISDN: It Still Does Nothing SCSI: System Cant See It MIPS: Meaningless Indication of Processor Speed DOS: Defunct Operating System WINDOWS: Will Install Needless Data On Whole System OS/2: Obsolete Soon, Too PnP: Plug and Pray APPLE: Arrogance Produces Profit-Losing Entity IBM: I Blame Microsoft MICROSOFT: Most Intelligent Customers Realize Our Software Only Fools Teenagers COBOL: Completely Obsolete Business Oriented Language LISP: Lots of Insipid and Stupid Parentheses MACINTOSH: Most Applications Crash; If Not, The Operating System Hangs AAAAA: American Association Against Acronym Abuse. WYSIWYMGIYRRLAAGW: What You See Is What You Might Get If Youre Really Really Lucky And All Goes Well. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Why computers are like men: 1. 2. 3. 4. In order to get their attention, you have to turn them on. They have a lot of data, but are still clueless. They are supposed to help you solve problems, but half the time they are the problem. As soon as you commit to one, you realize that if you had waited a little longer, you could have had a better model.

Why computers are like women: 1. 2. 3. 4. No one but the Creator understands their internal logic. The native language they use to communicate with other computers is incomprehensible to everyone else. Even your smallest mistakes are stored in long-term memory for later retrieval. As soon as you make a commitment to one, you find yourself spending half your paycheck on accessories for it.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Laws of Computer Programming 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. Any given program, when running, is obsolete. Any given program costs more and takes longer. If a program is useful, it will have to be changed. If a program is useless, it will have to be documented. Any program will expand to fill available memory. The value of a program is proportional to the weight of its output. Program complexity grows until it exceeds the capabilities of the programmer who must maintain it. Any non-trivial program contains at least one bug. Undetectable errors are infinite in variety, in contrast to detectable errors, which by definition are limited.

10. Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

y y y y

Lubarskys Law of Cybernetic Entomology: Theres always one more bug. Shaws Principle: Build a system that even a fool can use, and only a fool will want to use it. Woltmans Law: Never program and drink beer at the same time. Gallois Revelation: If you put tomfoolery into a computer, nothing comes out but tomfoolery. But this tomfoolery, having passed through a very expensive machine, is somehow enobled, and no one dares to criticize it.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ A programmer finds himself in front of a committee that decides whether he should go to Heaven or Hell. The committee tells the programmer he has a say in the matter and asks him if he wants to see either Heaven or Hell before stating his preference. Sure, the programmer replies. I have a pretty good idea what Heaven is like, so lets see Hell. So an angel takes the programmer to a sunny beach, full of beautiful women in skimpy bikinis playing volleyball, listening to music and having a great time. Wow! he exclaims, Hell looks great! Ill take Hell! Instantly the programmer finds himself in red-hot lava with demons tearing at his flesh. Wheres the beach? The music? The women? he screams frantically to the angel. That was the demo, the angel replies as she vanishes. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Jesus and Satan have an argument as to who is the better programmer. This goes on for a few hours until they come to an agreement to hold a contest with God as the judge. They set themselves before their computers and begin. They type furiously, lines of code streaming up the screen, for several hours straight. Seconds before the end of the competition, a bolt of lightning strikes, taking out the electricity. Moments later, the power is restored, and God announces that the contest is over. He asks Satan to show his work. Visibly upset, Satan cries and says, I have nothing. I lost it all when the power went out. Very well, says God, let us see if Jesus has fared any better. Jesus presses a key, and the screen comes to life in vivid display, the voices of an angelic choir pour forth from the speakers.

Satan is astonished. He stutters, B-b-but how?! I lost everything, yet Jesus program is intact! How did he do it? God chuckles, Everybody knows Jesus saves. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Redneck Computer Terms LOG ON: Makin a woodstove hot. LOG OFF: Dont add no more wood. MONITOR: Keepin an eye on the wood stove. DOWNLOAD: Gittin the farwood off the truck. MEGA HERTZ: When youre not keerfull gittin the farwood. FLOPPY DISC: Whutcha git from trying to tote too much farwood. RAM: That thar thing whut splits the farwood. HARD DRIVE: Gittin home in the winter time. WINDOWS: Whut to shut when its cold outside. SCREEN: Whut to shut when its black fly season. BYTE: Whut them dang flys do. CHIP: Munchies fer the TV. MICRO CHIP: Whuts in the bottom of the munchie bag. MODEM: Whutcha do to the hay fields. DOT MATRIX: Old Dan Matrixs wife. LAP TOP: Whar the kitty sleeps. KEYBOARD: Whar you hang the dang truck keys. SOFTWARE: Them dang plastic forks and knifes. MOUSE: Whut eats the grain in the barn. MOUSE PAD: Thats hippie talk fer the mouse hole. MAINFRAME: Holds up the barn roof. PORT: Fancy Flatlander wine. ENTER: Northerner talk fer, Cmon in, yall. CLICK: Whut you hear when you cock your gun. DOUBLE CLICK: When the dang gun dont far when you pull the trigger. REBOOT: Whut you have to do at bedtime when you forgot the kittys still outside. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Software Development Cycles 1. 2. 3. Programmer produces code he believes is bug-free. Product is tested. 20 bugs are found. Programmer fixes 10 of the bugs and explains to the testing department that the other 10 arent really bugs. Testing department finds that five of the fixes didnt work and discovers 15 new bugs. Repeat three times steps 3 and 4. Due to marketing pressure and an extremely premature product announcement based on overly-optimistic programming schedule, the product is released. Users find 137 new bugs. Original programmer, having cashed his royalty check, is nowhere to be found. Newly-assembled programming team fixes almost all of the 137 bugs, but introduce 456 new ones.

4. 5. 6.

7. 8. 9.

10. Original programmer sends underpaid testing department a postcard from Fiji. Entire testing department quits.

11. Company is bought in a hostile takeover by competitor using profits from their latest release, which had 783 bugs. 12. New CEO is brought in by board of directors. He hires a programmer to redo program from scratch. 13. Programmer produces code he believes is bug-free ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Top 10 phrases spoken by a Klingon Programmer 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. A TRUE Klingon Warrior does not comment his code! By filing this bug report you have challenged the honor of my family. Prepare to die! You question the worthiness of my code? I should kill you where you stand! Our competitors are without honor! Specifications are for the weak and timid! This machine is GAGH! I need dual Pentium processors if I am to do battle with this code! Perhaps it IS a good day to die! I say we ship it! Our users will know fear and cower before our software! Ship it! Ship it and let them flee like the dogs they are! My program has just dumped Stova Core!

9.

10. Behold, the keyboard of Kalis! The greatest Klingon code warrior that ever lived! ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The programmer compiled an array of reasons as to why he can't find a girlfriend with a good <HEAD> on her <BODY>, reason 0 being that he has limited cache. So often he searches his memory to recall connecting to the TCP/IP tunnel of his last girlfriend -- sometimes even without a secure socket. His last girlfriend always complained about his lack of comments. He fumed, "I hate commenting!" Realizing it was a program requirement, he told her she had nice bits. This resulted in a Syntax Error. Now she demanded a massage but this was rejected as "Feature Creep." He smacked her back-end and shouted, "Who's your parent node?!" He scanned for open ports. He attempted to install a backdoor worm but her response was 403. While his data uploaded into her input device, she considered terminating the process. But instead she initiated a Do While loop where she recalled a previous boyfriend with a larger pointer. To expedite the routine, she screamed, "Hack into my system! Hack deep into my system! You're 1337, baby!" This caused his stack to overflow and he shot his GUI on her interface.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Whats the difference between drug dealers and computer programmers? Drug Dealers Refer to their clients as users. The first ones free! Computer Programmers Refer to their clients as users. Download a free trial version

Have important South-East Asian Have important South-East Asian connections (to help move the connections (to help debug the stuff). code). Strange jargon: Stick, Rock, Strange jargon: SCSI, Dime bag, E. RTFM, Java, ISDN. Realize that theres tons of cash in the 14- to 25-year-old market. Job is assisted by the industrys producing newer, more potent mixes. Often seen in the company of pimps and hustlers. Their product causes unhealthy addictions. Do your job well, and you can sleep with sexy movie stars who depend on you. Realize that theres tons of cash in the 14- to 25-year-old market. Job is assisted by industrys producing newer, faster machines. Often seen in the company of marketing people and venture capitalists. DOOM. Quake. SimCity. Duke Nukem 3D. Nuff said. Damn! Damn! DAMN!!!

Interviewer: "Is studying computer science the best way to prepare to be a programmer?" Bill Gates: "No, the best way to prepare is to write programs, and to study great programs that other people have written. In my case, I went to the garbage cans at the Computer Science Center and I fished out listings of their operating system."

"The primary purpose of the DATA statement is to give names to constants; instead of referring to pi as 3.141592653589793 at every appearance, the variable PI can be given that value with a DATA statement and used instead of the longer form of the constant. This also simplifies modifying the program, should the value of pi change." - FORTRAN manual for Xerox computers

"C makes it easy to shoot yourself in the foot. C++ makes it harder, but when you do, it blows away your whole leg." - Bjarne Stroustrup

"Programming graphics in X is like finding sqrt(pi) using Roman numerals." - Henry Spencer

"Never put off until run time what you can do at compile time." - David Gries, in "Compiler Construction for Digital Computers", circa 1969.

BASIC programmers never die, they GOSUB and don't RETURN.

Real programmers are surprised when the odometers in their cars don't turn from 99,999 to 99,99A.

FORTRAN is not a language. It's a way of turning a multi-million dollar mainframe into a $50 programmable scientific calculator.

Did you hear about the Irish programmer who invented a program to help him with free blackjack UK. He is still wondering why he isn't a millionaire.

C is almost a real language. Even the name sounds like it's gone through an optimizing compiler. Get rid of all of those stupid brackets and we'll talk.

Any sufficiently advanced bug is indistinguishable from a feature.

Programming is 10% science, 25% ingenuity and 65% getting the ingenuity to work with the science.

Science is to computer science as hydrodynamics is to plumbing.

We don't really understand it, so we'll give it to the programmers.

COBOL programmers understand why women hate periods.

Computer interfaces and user interfaces are as different as night and 1.

The human mind ordinarily operates at only ten 10% of its capacity, the rest is overhead for the operating system.

A computer scientist is someone who fixes things that aren't broken.

The computer is mightier than the pen, the sword, and usually the programmer.

Programming is an art form that fights back.

After a number of decimal places, who cares?

"Virtual" means never knowing where your next byte is coming from.

If at first you don't succeed, you must be a programmer.

"It's 5:50 a.m., Do you know where your stack pointer is?"

You never finish a program, you just stop working on it.

Deliver yesterday, code today, think tomorrow.

Him: "I can download games like Quake and play them during lunch, you know." Me: "We're only allowed 10 megs in our accounts, and the system administrators would notice you downloading a large file." o Him: "Nah, I could hack it so he couldn't." o Me: "Ah, so you are into hacking. By the way do you know any programming languages?" o Him: "Yeah, of course." o Me: "Which ones?" o Him: "I can't tell you or else you'll use them." o Me: "Just by mentioning C++ or Pascal or whatever will not instantly make me a genius with those languages." o Him: "Oh sorry, I didn't understand you. Yeah, I know C++ and Pascal." o Me: "What compiler do you use?" o Him: "Well, Qbasic is my favorite." o Me: "Nobody over the age of eight uses QBasic for serious purposes." o Him: "But they made windows with QBasic." I almost cried laughing.

o o

One day I was in a public park, reading "C++ For Dummies" when someone came up and asked me what I was reading. I told him I was reading a book about C++. He responded, "Oh, HTML kicks C++'s @$$."

Teacher: "You can't do spaces in HTML. If you see spaces on web pages, then they must be using java to override basic HTML. Java saved the Internet, because it removes limitations of HTML, but it's beyond the scope of this course to show you how to do it." My Friend: "Yesterday, I reprogrammed my computer." Me: "Okay...." My Friend: "Not my Mac, but my PC. It has Windows Vista." Me: "Yes, and what language did you use?" My Friend: (pause) "English." Me: "English?" My Friend: "Yeah, English."

o o o o o o o

I was the night-time operator for a university in the northern part of the state. We ran our administrative jobs locally, and the students submitted their jobs to us. We read their card decks into our IBM 370/115 which transmitted them to the IBM 370/165 at the capital which sent the results back to be printed. We then wrapped the listing around the kiddies' card decks and put them out for them to pick up. One evening a student was in the pickup area, looking at her listing, and crying. We operators were not required to help students, but if we had some extra time, we always did. I asked her what was wrong, and she said her program wasn't working right. I took the listing and looked it over. It was the first exercise given to first semester COBOL students. I saw nothing wrong with it. No compiler errors, no JCL errors, and the printout from the run even looked correct. So I said, "I don't see any errors." At that point she let out a great wail and sob. "I know!" she cried. "That's the problem!" "Huh?" I said. It turned out the the instructor told the class what all instructors tell their classes for the first computer program they ever write. "Don't worry about errors the first time you submit your deck. People always get errors the first time." Well, through some fluke of improbability, this girl managed to write a flawless program and key it into the key punch flawlessly and got a flawless run the very first time she tried it. The instructor told her to expect errors. She didn't get them, so she thought she was doing something wrong. I once worked for the IT department of a small manufacturing company. The new Vice President of IT claimed that he had been a programmer for more than twenty years prior. One time we were in a meeting with a software company we hired to build our web site for us. As they explained that the web pages would be written in HTML and Javascript, this VP stops them cold and says, "None of my guys here work with any of that Javascript stuff! This is a SQL shop! I only want these web pages written in SQL so we can support it ourselves!" Rather than correct a man who'd been a programmer for twenty years, I sat there with an amused look on my face for the remainder of the meeting. So did the people from the software company.

User: "Hey, can you help me? My program doesn't work."

o o o o o o

Consultant: "What is the problem? Are you using Turbo Pascal?" User: "Yes, the program just blocks the machine." Consultant: "Well, does it compile?" User: "I don't know -- it just doesn't run. You see? There's the EXE file. If you run it, it blocks the machine." Consultant: "And where is your source, the PAS file??" User: "I wrote it and renamed it to EXE so it could run."

One thing that many will run into in the computer industry, is employers who are rather clueless and yet don't necessarily realize this. In 1996, a friend told me about a boss he had that needed a C program written for him. After a week, the boss complained that the program wasn't done, and he asked my friend what was taking so long. o Friend: "The program is written, and I'm debugging it." o Boss: "What's wrong with you people? You make programming more difficult than it needs to be. I have Frontpage Express to write web pages with, and when I write code with it, I never need to debug it. If you were as good of a programmer as me, you'd never need to debug either." I was making my way through MSDN, looking at Win32 API console functions to make my own gotoxy() function in Visual C++ 6.0. My C++ programming teacher looked at my screen and asked: o Teacher: "What are you doing?" o Me: "I'm trying to find out how to make a gotoxy() in Visual C++. I'll have to use Win32 API functions." o Teacher: "No you don't have to use API functions! Just take Borland C++ 3.1 headers and put them in Visual C++ 6.0 include directory." o Me: "Heuh......." Unfortunately, Borland C++ 3.1 was designed for DOS and Win16. Visual C++ works on Win32. Worse, headers only contain types and class declarations, defines, and function prototypes. I don't know how my teacher thought this would work.

Programmer: "What do you mean, I can't initialize things in an assert()?"

During a code review, when I asked why (besides the source control file headers) there was not a comment in 240,000 lines of code which was getting handed over to me for maintenance, the programmer replied, "I'm terse." I found this comment in a program I was given to edit: if x then #if condition is true [do something] end if. It literally said "if condition is true;" it wasn't an expansion on the significance of x. I was helping a friend with some code. In the code, I found the line: x = x; and removed it. I made some further changes and send the code back to him. He told me he still had errors. So he sent me his code again, and again I found the same line. I asked him why he kept putting that in there, and he replied, "So x doesn't lose its value." One time a girl in my introduction to programming class told me that she hated Microsoft and started using UNIX to compile her programs. Later on, she emailed me and said she hated UNIX now, too, because it would compile her program but not allow her to retrieve her data. So I asked her to send her code to me, and I would take a look at it. I stumbled upon this: int addandsubtract (int a, int b) { return (a + b); return (b - a); } I asked her the purpose of this function, and she told me she wanted to first get the sum of a and b and then get the difference. She didn't understand why this wouldn't work, and it took me an hour or so to explain why. I teach a C programming course. For one of the assignments, somebody once copied a program verbatim from a fellow student who did the course two years before. He did pay attention, though: following the updated course material, which said that 'main' should return an error code, he changed: void main (...) { ... }

to: int void main (...) { ... } Needless to say, the program didn't even compile. In college, I worked as a teaching assistant for an introductory programming language. For most of the people in the class, this was probably their first and only programming class. One day, I was doing program code reviews with a handful of students. This one girl gave me her code, and, after looking at it, I asked why she had repeated a certain line twice: let x = 7; let x = 7; She said, "Just in case it didn't get set right the first time." When a computer professor asked his students to comment all their programs, he got remarks like: o "This program is very nice." o "This program is very difficult." o "This program is very interesting." I found this comment in some code I had to maintain: /* This function is BOOL but actually returns TRUE, FALSE and -2 because I've no time to change it to int */ Didn't it take more time to write the comment? When I was studying programming, one of my classmates was having serious troubles with his program. When he asked me for help, I leaned over his screen and saw all of his code in comments. The reason: "Well, it compiles much faster that way." In college I worked as a consultant. One day this grad student was having trouble with his Fortran program and brought the printout to me. He said he kept changing things but couldn't get it to run correctly. His analysis: "I get the feeling that the computer just skips over all the comments." I tutored college students who were taking a computer programming course. A few of them didn't understand that computers are not sentient. More than one person used comments in their Pascal programs to put detailed explanations such as, "Now I need you to put these letters on the screen." I asked one of them what the deal was with those comments. The reply: "How else is the computer going to understand what I want it to do?" Apparently they would assume that since they couldn't make sense of Pascal, neither could the computer. I was taking an introductory programming course. One assignment was to do a little payroll program, including some data validation. The program was supposed to accept terminal input and send output back to either the console or a printer. Suddenly the printer began spewing out paper like crazy. One of the students (a particularly mouthy woman) had programmed a less-than-helpful error message ("YOU ARE WRONG") and then not provided any exit from the error-checking logic -- the program just re-read the last (failing) input and re-tested it. All in all, it was a very nice infinite loop. After spitting through about fifty pages of "YOU ARE WRONG," somebody cut power to the printer, and the instructor had to flush the print queue manually. He went back to the student and asked if she had tested the program by sending the output to the console before trying to print it, and she said, yes, she had tested it on the console and ended up with a screen full of "YOU ARE WRONG" messages. Why, then, had she sent her output to the printer? "I thought I would be daring!" A colleague wrote the documentation for the return codes from a set of functions in one of his DLLs. Among the documentation was this: /* Return code=1: generic error condition Return code=2: all other error conditions */ I was taking a C programming class once, and the class was divided up into two programming teams. On my team we had a woman who was totally out of her league. What earned her legendary status was doing a global search and replace, swapping out asterisks for ampersands, because she felt the asterisks weren't "working." I was just teaching an optional class on C programming; in the first class meeting, I asked, "Does anybody know anything about programming?" To which one of my students gleefully replied, "I know how to use a chat program!"

I was asked to maintain a shell script that was taking too long to run and wasn't reliable. Among other horrors, the one that gave me the best mix of laughter and fear was a repeated construct like this: display=`env | grep DISPLAY | sed 's/[^=]*=//g'` DISPLAY=$display export DISPLAY This made me scratch my head for a moment, until I realized that this was a complete no-op. It's equal to DISPLAY=$DISPLAY (except when the grep command pulls out the wrong thing). This was repeated for something like a dozen environment variables. I still cannot fathom the logic of it. I ended up doing a complete rewrite. I was asked about taking on a contract to maintain a piece of software. Something about the way it was presented made me wary. I asked to look over it first. What a sight! I use it as an example of why not to use global variables. Among other things, there were files with suites of functions on the following order: adjust_alpha() { alpha = gamma + offset * 3; } adjust_beta() { beta = gamma + offset * 3; } Dozens of functions that differed only by the global variable they modified. Just picture it: a multi-thousand line program with a graphical interface and a database that never used function parameters. The original programmer painted himself into a corner with his variable names. Clearly if you need variables "up," "down," "left," and "right," you name them as such. When he found himself needing those direction names in different parts of his program but was stuck because global variable names had to be unique, his solution was to use names like: up, _up, up_, Up, uP, UP, _Up, _UP down, _down, down_, Down, dOWN, DOWN, _Down, _DOWN ...and so on. Even the densest of my students comprehended immediately why that was bad. Needless to say, I turned down the job. While working on a programming project in highschool with a friend, I mentioned to him that if he really wants to name his variables things like x, xx, and xx2, he should at least put comments saying what they're used for. The next time I looked over his shoulder, I saw this: int x; // x is an int Some years ago, a friend and I were jointly writing a game in C++. We were repeatedly getting inexplicable access violation errors in a piece of code which should have been rock solid. Eventually we found something like this, obviously left over from a past debugging hack: ((class CNetwork *) 0x05af12b0)->Initialise(); It had gone unnoticed for a while because, out of sheer luck, all the builds we'd done since that hack hadn't changed the address in memory of that particular instance of CNetwork. Obviously we had eventually changed something which caused it to be allocated elsewhere: cue major chaos. If anyone has heard of a dumber programming practice than hardcoding a pointer, I'd like to see it! This was found in code written by an ex-employee. strcpy(vl_name,"00000000000000000"); strcpy(vl_volume,"000000"); strncpy(temp1,vl_lud,4); temp1[4]='\0'; strncpy(temp2,vl_name+4,13); temp2[13]='\0'; strcat(temp1,temp2);

strcpy(temp2,""); sprintf(temp2,"%d",vl_serial_num); temp1[7]='\0'; strcat(temp1,temp2); strcat(temp1,"000000000"); temp1[8]='.'; strncpy(temp1,temp1,9); temp1[9]='\0'; strcat(temp1,vl_data_set_name); temp1[17]='\0'; strcpy(vl_name,temp1); strcpy(vl_volume,"1"); My friend is a programming teacher at a local high school, where there are two programming classes -- one taught by him and one by another teacher. Recently he spent WEEKS preparing the major assessment that both classes would do, a large assignment that the students would work on for the next few months. As well as making the question sheet for the students, he also made an answer sheet for the other teacher, so that she could familiarize herself with the assignment before giving it to her class. But this other teacher knows NOTHING about programming and wasn't able to tell the difference between the question sheet and answer sheet, and so she wound up photocopying the answer sheet and handing it out to every student in her class. She no longer teaches programming. This little bit of Java was written as part of a group project at university. The friend who passed it to me has been bouncing off the walls about the quality of the guilty party's code (silly things like defining error and success codes with the same value so you don't know what the return code means and stuff like that), but this is the most obviously stupid bit. public int convertItoi(Integer v) { if (v.intValue()==1) return 1; if (v.intValue()==2) return 2; if (v.intValue()==3) return 3; if (v.intValue()==4) return 4; if (v.intValue()==5) return 5; if (v.intValue()==6) return 6; if (v.intValue()==7) return 7; return 0; } Days ago I had to fix a bug into our software. The person that originally wrote the module quit, so I had total control of the source code. I totally rewrote half of the code when I found things like: int i; memset(&i, 0, sizeof(int)); And: switch (k) { case 9: printf("9\n"); case 8: if (k==8) printf("8\n"); case 7: if (k==7) printf("7\n"); // and so on... } I wondered why he put the "if" clauses, but then I noticed that none of the cases has its "break" statement, so if he found that if k was 9, the program printed 9, 8, 7, etc. So I think he added the "if" clauses to fix that behavior. The masterpiece, however, was the following, where two consecutive errors actually caused the program to work fine: char msg[40]; unsigned char k,j; memset(msg, 0, 41); /* to set the terminator */ j = k; ...

Of course the "memset" was supposed to reset the msg variable, but it actually also reset k, for which no initialization was provided; could be a deliberate if hackish and unreliable solution, but that "set the terminator" comment gives it away. In fact, all over his code he managed to add one for the "terminator," one byte past the end of the character array he was working on. About four years ago, I was working on a project that, among other things, involved porting several million lines of code. While not technically real-time, the code needed to be reasonably fast. At one point, I found the following gem: unsigned long reverse(unsigned long theWord) { unsigned long result = 0; int i; for (i = 0; i < 32; ++i) { if (theWord & (unsigned long) pow(2.0, (double) i)) result += (unsigned long) pow(2.0, (double) (31 - i)); } return result; } Obviously, the purpose was to reverse the bits in a word. Naturally, I called all of my colleagues over to see this, and we all marvelled at how someone would think that a conversion to floating-point, a function call, and a conversion to integer could be faster than one shift operation. To say nothing of the possibility of rounding errors completely screwing up the, um, algorithm. Not wanting to leave an exercise for the reader, here's the replacement: unsigned long reverse(unsigned long theWord) { unsigned long result = 0; int i; for (i = 0; i < 32; ++i) { if (theWord & (1 << i)) result += 1 << (31 - i); } return result; } An introductory programming student once asked me to look at his program and figure out why it was always churning out zeroes as the result of a simple computation. I looked at the program, and it was pretty obvious: begin readln("Number of Apples", apples); readln("Number of Carrots", carrots); readln("Price for 1 Apple", a_price); readln("Price for 1 Carrot", c_price); writeln("Total for Apples", a_total); writeln("Total for Carrots", c_total); writeln("Total", total); total := a_total + c_total; a_total := apples * a_price; c_total := carrots + c_price; end; o Me: "Well, your program can't print correct results before they're computed." o Him: "Huh? It's logical what the right solution is, and the computer should reorder the instructions the right way." At my previous job, we were porting a UNIX system to Windows NT using Microsoft VC++. A colleague of mine, that was in the process of porting his portion of the code, came to me, looking really upset. o Colleague: "Hey! I hate these Microsoft guys! What a rotten compiler! It only accepts 16,384 local variables in a function!" I ran across this gem while debugging someone else's old code once:

if (value == 0) return value; else return 0; I found this buried in our code somewhere: if (a) { /* do something */ return x; } else if (!a) { /* do something else */ return y; } else { /* do something entirely different */ return z; } I had a probationary programmer working for me. Needless to say, he never got to be permanent. One day I was inspecting his C code and found this: if ( a = 1 ) { ...some code... } else { ...some other code... } I told him the "else" clause will never get executed because of his "if" statement. I asked him to figure out why. He said he'd "investigate" it first. I allowed him to "investigate," since it had not been a critical task. A day later, he told me he figured out the problem. He said he used an incorrect operand in the "if" statement -- it should have been == instead of =, which was absolutely correct. But then he emailed me his revised code. a = 1; if ( a == 1 ) { ...some code... } else { ...some other code... } What the...? I asked him if the "a = 1" part was necessary and not just a fragment of debug code he forgot to remove. He said it was necessary. So I asked him if the "else" statement would ever be executed. He said yes. I asked him to give me a situation when such would occur. He said he'd get back to me with the explanation. I kicked him out of the project that same afternoon. Once I ran across code that did this to test the i-th bit in a byte-wide value: if (value && (int)pow(2,i)) { ... } Digging in the code a colleague wrote years ago, I found the following: EndWhile = 0; while (EndWhile == 0) { ... if (index < MAX) EndWhile = 0;

else EndWhile = 1; index = index + 1; } Years ago, I put a simple, fortune cookie style program out on an FTP site. It was too simplistic to look at environment variables or configuration files to look for the location of the fortune cookie database file; the path was compiled into the executable. I provided the source, so if you wanted to change the path it was installed in, you had to change it in the source file and recompile. Since I put it out, every so often I'll get an email message commenting on it. Recently, I received a message asking for help trying to get the thing to work. He couldn't get the executable to find the database file properly. I answered him, and he mailed back saying nothing helped. I mailed him again, saying that the readme file which was included in the archive should have very detailed instructions. He mailed me back saying the readme file didn't help him. So he mailed me the source code file, asked me to change it to the way it should be, then mail it back to him. I told him, but as I was typing in my final reply, a horrific thought occurred to me. So I asked: o Me: "I assume you have a C compiler, right?" o User: "What's a C compiler??????/ I've been editing it using the DOS editor." I was working for a consulting firm that was called in to help another firm that was doing some fairly important UNIX work for a large Wall Street firm. They were all Mac programmers that had taken a week long course in UNIX, C programming, and UI programming for this particular workstation. I took a look at their C code and it was littered with the following code statement: strcat(string,"\0"); I asked why they were doing this. The reply was, in a "don't you know?" tone of voice: "All strings in C must end in a null zero!" Trying to explain that strcat wouldn't work unless the null terminator was there already just got me blank stares. I've seen this code excerpt in a lot of freeware gaming programs for UNIX: /* * Bit values. */ #define BIT_0 1 #define BIT_1 2 #define BIT_2 4 #define BIT_3 8 #define BIT_4 16 #define BIT_5 32 #define BIT_6 64 #define BIT_7 128 #define BIT_8 256 #define BIT_9 512 #define BIT_10 1024 #define BIT_11 2048 #define BIT_12 4096 #define BIT_13 8192 #define BIT_14 16384 #define BIT_15 32768 #define BIT_16 65536 #define BIT_17 131072 #define BIT_18 262144 #define BIT_19 524288 #define BIT_20 1048576 #define BIT_21 2097152 #define BIT_22 4194304 #define BIT_23 8388608 #define BIT_24 16777216 #define BIT_25 33554432 #define BIT_26 67108864 #define BIT_27 134217728 #define BIT_28 268435456

#define BIT_29 536870912 #define BIT_30 1073741824 #define BIT_31 2147483648 A much easier way of achieving this is: #define BIT_0 0x00000001 #define BIT_1 0x00000002 #define BIT_2 0x00000004 #define BIT_3 0x00000008 #define BIT_4 0x00000010 ... #define BIT_28 0x10000000 #define BIT_29 0x20000000 #define BIT_30 0x40000000 #define BIT_31 0x80000000 An easier way still is to let the compiler do the calculations: #define BIT_0 (1) #define BIT_1 (1 << 1) #define BIT_2 (1 << 2) #define BIT_3 (1 << 3) #define BIT_4 (1 << 4) ... #define BIT_28 (1 << 28) #define BIT_29 (1 << 29) #define BIT_30 (1 << 30) #define BIT_31 (1 << 31) But why go to all the trouble of defining 32 constants? The C language also has parameterized macros. All you really need is: #define BIT(x) (1 << (x)) Anyway, I wonder if guy who wrote the original code used a calculator or just computed it all out on paper. When I was still a student, I worked as an admin for the university CS dept. Part of this job involved time in the student labs. Our network was a conglomeration of Suns and SGIs and was generally confusing for novice users who don't understand the concept of multiuser, multitasking, networked computers. Around the room are large signs explaining how to log in, along with big warnings about not removing power unless you like the idea of having a grad student running a several million variable modeling project he's been working on for several years show up and beat you death with research papers. You would be amazed how many people try to type in a program at the "Login:" prompt, and then turn the machine off when they are done. The worst of the bunch then complain about not being able to find the program they just typed in at the login prompt. I was looking through a shell script I had written recently, and I almost died when I saw some of the code. I'm embarrassed to admit it, but here's one thing I had done: if ($var = value) then # do something else # do the exact same thing as in the other code endif While in college, I used to tutor in the school's math lab. A student came in because his BASIC program would not run. He was taking a beginner course, and his assignment was to write a program that would calculate the recipe for oatmeal cookies, depending upon the number of people you're baking for. I looked at his program, and it went something like this: 10 Preheat oven to 350 20 Combine all ingredients in a large mixing bowl 30 Mix until smooth . . . A "software engineer" I used to work with once had a problem with his code that looked something like this:

a_pointer->fn(); It caused a General Protection error. He knew C, but not C++ -- I did, so he asked me for help. I told him to check to see if the pointer was NULL before making the call. A couple of hours later he came back; the problem was still happening. if (a_pointer == NULL) { LogError(); } a_pointer->fn(); I said, "You need a return statement after the LogError call." He said, thoughtfully, "Where does it return to?" A friend of mine wanted to keep track of the other users on the UNIX systems of our university. There is a nice command "last" on UNIX which will list the last users to have logged in. So he wrote a script that'd log in to all workstations of the department by remote shell and run the "last" command, with the results sent back to the originating host, to be collected in aggregate form. He called this little script "last" -- same name as the UNIX system command -- and put it in his home directory. His path was set up so his home directory had a higher precedence than the UNIX bin directories. So when he ran the "last" command, it would use his own script instead of the system command. So he ran the script. It logged in to all the other workstations just fine. Then it ran the "last" command -- the one in his home directory, of course, not the system command. You can guess what happened. It got in an infinite loop that tried to log into every workstation an infinite number of times. This very effectively nuked off the whole department, and all workstations had to be shut down for it to stop. One of our customers, a major non-US defense contractor, complained that their code ran too slowly. It was a comedy of errors. Act I o Contractor: "Can you make our code run faster?" o Tech Support: "Yes, but we have to take a look at it." o Contractor: "We can't, the code is classified." o Tech Support: "Can you explain to me what your code is doing?" o Contractor: "No, that's classified." o Tech Support: "Can you tell us what functions you use?" o Contractor: "No that's classified." Act II So, on a hunch, we sent them the latest version of our software for Windows NT. o Contractor: "Why is this running faster on our 800MHz Pentium than on our VAX?" o Tech Support: "When did you buy that VAX?" o Contractor: "Some time in the late 1980s." Act III Finally, some of their code was declassified. We looked at it, and one piece of it contained a routine for reading one million or so integers from a file. Rather than opening the file once and reading them all in, there was a loop: it would open the file, read the first integer, and close it; then open it again, read the second integer, and close it; etc.

The First Poem Written for Computers <>!*''# ^"`$$!*=@$_ %*<>~4 &[]../ |{,,SYSTEM HALTED For you somewhat cybernetically challenged, it goes something like this (using the proper cyber-names): Waka waka bang splat tick tick hash, Caret quote back-tick dollar dollar dash, Bang splat equal at dollar under-score, Percent splat waka waka tilde number four, Ampersand bracket bracket dot dot slash, Vertical-bar curly-bracket comma comma CRASH

A young Programmer and his Project Manager board a train headed through the mountains on its way to Wichita. They can find no place to sit except for two seats right across the aisle from a young woman and her grandmother. After a while, it is obvious that the young woman and the young programmer are interested in each other, because they are giving each other looks. Soon the train passes into a tunnel and it is pitch black. There is a sound of a kiss followed by the sound of a slap. When the train emerges from the tunnel, the four sit there without saying a word. The grandmother is thinking to herself, It was very brash for that young man to kiss my granddaughter, but Im glad she slapped him. The Project manager is sitting there thinking, I didnt know the young tech was brave enough to kiss the girl, but I sure wish she hadnt missed him when she slapped me! The young woman was sitting and thinking, Im glad the guy kissed me, but I wish my grandmother had not slapped him! The young programmer sat there with a satisfied smile on his face. He thought to himself, Life is good. How often does a guy have the chance to kiss a beautiful girl and slap his Project manager all at the same time!

A physicist, an engineer and a programmer were in a car driving over a steep alpine pass when the brakes failed. The car was getting faster and faster, they were struggling to get round the corners and once or twice only the feeble crash barrier saved them from crashing down the side of the mountain. They were sure they were all going to die, when suddenly they spotted an escape lane. They pulled into the escape lane, and came safely to a halt. The physicist said "We need to model the friction in the brake pads and the resultant temperature rise, see if we can work out why they failed". The engineer said "I think I've got a few spanners in the back. I'll take a look and see if I can work out what's wrong". The programmer said "Why don't we get going again and see if it's reproducible?"