this post was submitted on 31 May 2025
807 points (98.7% liked)

Programmer Humor

23711 readers
2478 users here now

Welcome to Programmer Humor!

This is a place where you can post jokes, memes, humor, etc. related to programming!

For sharing awful code theres also Programming Horror.

Rules

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 
top 50 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] UberKitten@lemmy.blahaj.zone 0 points 8 hours ago

this is a crap question, glad it was closed

[–] wfh@lemm.ee 189 points 5 days ago (4 children)

In my time we didn't paste LLM-generated code we barely understand and hoped it compiled, let alone work. We pasted code from stack overflow we barely understood and hoped it compiled and let alone work, as god intended.

[–] ZILtoid1991@lemmy.world 15 points 4 days ago (2 children)

You're young. Back in my day, we bought a book called "Advanced Algorithms for C vol. 3", and we manually typed the code from it if it didn't come with a CD.

[–] rikudou@lemmings.world 2 points 18 hours ago

I'm too young for that, but I got a piece of that experience when I bought a physical programming book as a reward from Kickstarter.

Some of the code lines were too long to fit the page and were cut off which added another fun element (though it was pretty rare).

[–] wfh@lemm.ee 9 points 4 days ago (1 children)

When I was a kid I remember copying entire games in BASIC printed in popular science magazines. They never worked because my dads computer had a slightly different BASIC dialect.

Good times.

[–] G4Z@feddit.uk 5 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (2 children)

I remember on the C64 they used to have 'pokes' which were written in assembler.

You'd have to manually typing 500 lines of it. Of course, it almost never worked. The times it did work I used to save it to a tape, I think I had about 9 cheats on it :)

load more comments (2 replies)
[–] rickyrigatoni@lemm.ee 51 points 4 days ago (6 children)

God has no hand in programming. He's just as confused as us.

[–] lars@lemmy.sdf.org 20 points 4 days ago (1 children)

I am a better programmer than God, peace be upon Him. This implementation of knees is Exhibit 1.

[–] Beanie@programming.dev 7 points 4 days ago (2 children)

ok but real talk, knees are genuinely one of the most marvellous pieces of biomechanical engineering. They can withstand decades of constant movement, can allow extension (with a lot of force) even when bent 180°, can withstand - and move - hundreds of kg per knee (with enough practice) periodically also for decades, and can comfortably remain with your entire body weight resting on them at any angle from 0 to 180° for any length of time. It's amazing that everyone doesn't have constant knee pain or have their knees simply fail altogether.

[–] rikudou@lemmings.world 1 points 18 hours ago

As a representative of those who have had a constant knee pain for over a decade: I'm slightly less thrilled about the design.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] pezhore@infosec.pub 16 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Oh there's definitely some elder gods involved with programming when I do it.

[–] voracitude@lemmy.world 12 points 4 days ago (1 children)

User Feedback, the Crawling Chaos, the Haunter of the Dark... I feel its tendrils of madness reaching for my mind even now. I am not ready for this. Ph'nglui mglw'nafh caffeine R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn! Iä! Iä!

[–] rikudou@lemmings.world 2 points 18 hours ago (1 children)

Ah, I see you're a fellow html regex parsing enthusiast.

[–] voracitude@lemmy.world 1 points 16 hours ago

I thought mine was funny because I had not seen that, and I am humbled. Damn. Fukken saved.

load more comments (4 replies)
[–] porous_grey_matter@lemmy.ml 13 points 4 days ago (2 children)

Now we're still pasting code from stack overflow we don't understand, we're just getting it from an LLM

[–] echodot@feddit.uk 7 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (1 children)

At least now I don't have to deal with the rudeners.

I do like the fact that when I ask it a question it actually gives me the answer, and doesn't tell me to refactor my entire code because apparently I'm a bad person.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] TheSlad@sh.itjust.works 11 points 4 days ago (2 children)

Yes, but did the LLM get it from the answers or the questions?....

load more comments (2 replies)
load more comments (1 replies)
[–] LovableSidekick@lemmy.world 115 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (9 children)

I think the same people who run stackoverflow must run a ton of subs on reddit.

"Your post was removed because it uses "the" too much and doesn't contain enough w's and because the moon is in Pisces and it's Saturday. If you think this was done in error please message the moderators."

[–] reksas@sopuli.xyz 16 points 4 days ago

messages moderator about it, banned from subreddit for no reason given. Or at least that is how i imagine how it would go

[–] Hupf@feddit.org 13 points 4 days ago (3 children)
[–] bampop@lemmy.world 8 points 4 days ago

That's hilarious. I do hope it gets evaluated at run time. That way you could have a program that works most of the time but if some rare circumstance caused it to execute commands in a sequence where the correct level of politeness was not maintained it would get the hump and crash

load more comments (2 replies)
load more comments (7 replies)
[–] DarkDarkHouse@lemmy.sdf.org 73 points 4 days ago (2 children)

Thanks Cloudflare for giving me a moment of reflection on why the fuck I am heading to Stack Overflow so I can close the tab before I get there.

[–] user224@lemmy.sdf.org 54 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (4 children)

CF: We defended your website from 69,420 bots today!

The 65,000 users: 👁️L👁️

load more comments (4 replies)
load more comments (1 replies)
[–] MystikIncarnate@lemmy.ca 26 points 4 days ago

IMO, this would be more ironic if the post was closed automatically by a bot. But that's not the vibe I'm getting from this.

[–] lime@feddit.nu 109 points 5 days ago (2 children)

well yeah they went all in on ai.

load more comments (2 replies)
[–] scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech 75 points 5 days ago (4 children)

Stack overflow has always been ego and arrogance. Personally I'd love to see a federated version, we all host shards

[–] sturger@sh.itjust.works 20 points 4 days ago

You are correct. But without defending Stack Overflow, I feel the need to point out that the arrogance and condescension is by no means limited to their platform. I’ve been on several “support” pages that were the same or worse. For example Evernote’s “support”. It wasn’t “officially” hosted by Evernote, but had the Evernote logo everywhere . The most common phrases I remember from there are the equivalent of:

  • “The Evernote devs don’t read this site, so you’re wasting your time trying to appeal to them here.”
  • “That’s stupid, why do you have that problem?”
  • “No, you don’t want to do that.”
  • “No, you don’t want that feature and neither does anyone else.”
  • etc.

I can only guess that asking moderators deal with the internet public for no pay is more than reasonable people are willing to do. So we wind up with unpaid people with people skills equivalent to 13 y.o. boys put in charge. Their only compensation being allowed to troll users and feel they have power over some small portion of other people. My guess is they eventually grow older and move on to being in charge of a homeowner association.

[–] Evotech@lemmy.world 18 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Why would you think it would be different

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] kazerniel@lemmy.world 17 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (2 children)

Yes please. I tried participating in some StackExchange communities many years ago, but they felt so hostile to new contributors. Like I asked an immigration-related question about my personal situation, and multiple people edited my question to change the grammar and take out the thanks and smiley at the end 🤦 Oh no, we can't have a bit of humanity in there... Multiple similar experiences left such a bitter taste, that I ended up deleting most of my sub-profiles. I found Reddit-style communities much more helpful. Even wikis are typically nowhere near this hostile.

SE seems too heavily focusing on helping a "generic public" rather than the actual people asking the questions. (Or even answering them, with all the reputation restrictions on accounts.) I'm sure I'm not the only contributor they pushed away :/

[–] bleistift2@sopuli.xyz 11 points 4 days ago (3 children)

multiple people edited my question to change the grammar and take out the thanks and smiley at the end

Well, the Welcome Tour tells you that SO is about “just questions and answers”. This facilitates finding a question that’s written as concise as possible, checking its answer, and leaving. SO is deliberately not like a forum.

SE seems too heavily focusing on helping a “generic public” rather than the actual people asking the questions.

This is just another consequence of not being a forum. Of course SO wants questions to be helpful to as many people as possible. I don’t see how that is a bad thing.

If you want a laxer approach to handling quality, consider if you’ve ever found useful information on yahoo answers.

load more comments (3 replies)
load more comments (1 replies)
load more comments (1 replies)
[–] fckreddit@lemmy.ml 52 points 5 days ago (1 children)

I wouldn't call stackoverflow reliable. It is only partly reliable, if you are lucky.

[–] Opisek@lemmy.world 39 points 5 days ago (4 children)

Thread closed because that's a stupid question and you should feel bad about yourself.

[–] fckreddit@lemmy.ml 19 points 5 days ago (2 children)

I do. Let me delete my account and come back tomorrow with the same question.

load more comments (2 replies)
load more comments (3 replies)
[–] WhiskyTangoFoxtrot@lemmy.world 38 points 4 days ago (4 children)

Good riddance. Whenever I search for a programming question I'd always hope for a) an official documentation page or, failing that, b) a page on a dedicated forum for the tool that I was using that covered the problem. I'd only ever click on SO links if I had no other choice.

And, of course, I'd never search for a problem on SO itself.

[–] squaresinger@lemmy.world 2 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

SO used to be good, but they have this problem right down in their core concept that makes sure the content gets outdated fast.

And that's the concept that every question can only be asked once.

That makes sure that everything gets outdated as soon as possible.

  • Q: Can X be done in framework Y? (asked in 2012)
  • A: No.

Now it's 13 years later, and framework Y can do X since 5 years, but you can't ask again, because your question will get closed as a duplicate to the outdated one from 2012. And since every time someone asked this question again in the last 13 years the question just got closed, google will just link you back to the question from 2012 claiming that framework Y can't do X.

[–] Lex4@lemm.ee 31 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

I hate that so many projects are moving from public support forums to fucking Discord channels. God forbid a tech project be expected to maintain a public indexable forum and website. You can't search it unless you join the channel, it's not well organized at all, and the invite link probably expired 3 months ago. Fuck you if you didn't join while it still worked I guess.

[–] kazerniel@lemmy.world 28 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (1 children)

Eh, I hate its culture, but I regularly find useful excel or regex answers on StackExchange.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] Simulation6@sopuli.xyz 17 points 4 days ago (2 children)

I almost always prefer SO answers because there was chance someone had the same issue I was seeing. Documentation only shows how things should work and dedicated forums are very hit or miss.

load more comments (2 replies)
[–] Decq@lemmy.world 31 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (3 children)

Not necessarily about stack overflow. But i just got myself in a situation where the first search result I found for a problem was clearly AI generated. And the solution it provided was not at all technically possible. The AI decline is really terrible...

That said, does anyone know of an extension or block list for those terrible AI slob websites? Or a way to filter it from duckduckgo?

[–] SqueakyBeaver@lemmy.blahaj.zone 16 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (1 children)

This AI blocklist for uBlacklist and uBlock origin should help.

load more comments (1 replies)
load more comments (2 replies)
[–] daniskarma@lemmy.dbzer0.com 23 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

Mods be thinking that if they dig SO's grave deep enough it will emerge on the other side of the world.

[–] Gsus4@mander.xyz 23 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (3 children)

Anybody remember what it was like 16+ years ago when "most questions" hadn't already been asked yet?

PS: lol https://web.archive.org/web/20090330211513/http://stackoverflow.com/

[–] mmddmm@lemm.ee 10 points 4 days ago

Yeah, that site was good before they started rejecting every useful question.

It used to be much better than anything else that came earlier. Nowadays the odds are even that you'll find your answer on the experts-one.

load more comments (2 replies)
load more comments
view more: next ›