Disclaimer: The April[0] Post you are about to read is not meant to be amusing. Please adjust your expectations now. Lighthearted, yes, but it will not make you laugh aloud. Really, it will not be amusing unless you somehow make it so by assigning a meaning it was never intended to have. By reading this post hopefully you will gain insights that allow you to be a funnier blogger. When Frank Bunker Gilbreth's children, whom he was teaching to touch type, asked if he could touch type, he only replied "They tell me Caruso's voice teacher can't sing a by-jingoed note." May it be so with this post.
It's challenging to write truly good April Fool's material about programming issues, but almost programmatically easy to write lame material. One reason things are funny is that (1) they violate expectations, and that (2) they do so in a way that doesn't personally impact you, as in Mel Brook's observation "Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you walk into an open sewer and die".
We're immersed in dark humor by the nature of our process-based profession. Programmers with customers (the most interesting kind of programmers) keep huge databases of failed expectations. These only get funny with distance: either in time or in organizational chart hops. Your coworkers' bugs are more likely to be funnier than your own, but only until your manager decides to reassign to you. Another team's bugs are funnier. Unless you rely on that feature. And so on.
The other kind of expectation, that program P (browser, language, Turing-capable text editor) expects input format X and generates output format Y, are also targets for humor: "Bwahaha, a web browser that accepts COBOL as an HTML scripting language" if it's well-known that this combination doesn't exist and doesn't seem to make sense. Humor playing on this type of expectation is fragile, because the expectations are broken on purpose all the time by the current of software development progress. It's only a matter of time when "Ruby VM in Javascript" moves from being funny to being accepted way of life. Maybe COBOL is funny today, but legacy systems have a way of creating needs that can be solved by software. If you want a joke candidate generator, write a program that generates T diagrams with all possible combinations of known programming languages at the different points. The funny ones will be funny because they violate the intended design of the language: Logo as an implementation language for a Fortress to Haskell compiler. (It's probably a good sign for a language if it's never funny at any point on the T.)
Take a look at the April Fools gags out there related to programming and see how many are analogous to "that idiot tried to plug a USB cable into a Firewire socket". The DailyWTF material is kind of a catalog of such expectations:
- You should write code without explicitly specifying every input case
- Code should have a purpose, unlike this if check:
if( nextIndex != currIndex )
{
nextIndex = currIndex;
} - You should use a standard library function rather than writing your own buggy version
- You shouldn't transform data through several unnecessary layers (the digital camera/wooden table technique)
- Code should, ideally, do something productive, especially if you're paid to create it
Note: COBOL is one of those all-purpose humor words, kind of the "weasel" of programming humor. Source: Ask Mr. Language Person.
Lame subtlety spoiler: If you skipped the disclaimer, and thought this was supposed to be somehow funny just because it's April[0], check the title. Also, it's not realistic to expect to get a funny blog post in polynomial time from the T-diagram generator. Not that I tried.
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