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Every occupation has its anecdotes and inside jokes. Mathematicians joke about algebra, statistics, calculus, etc. Teachers have memes about what it's like to shape young minds and be criminally underappreciated in society. And programmers, the most tech-savvy of careers, have their specific humor as well.

The subreddit r/ProgrammerHumor is where coders and seasoned developers come to share funny content about their everyday lives. We've featured this community many times on Bored Panda over the years, so, this is the best-of-all-time edition. Whether you're a beginner or an experienced programmer whose impeccably clean code can make grown men weep, I'm sure you'll find something for yourself down below!

#1

Funny-Programmer-Humor-Best-All-Time

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Robert T
Community Member
1 week ago (edited) DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

2024 edition. In the absence of a Reject All cookie setting, go through and untick all 20 "legitimate interest" boxes. There is no such thing as a legimitate interest in my web browser you nosey ****s!

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#2

Funny-Programmer-Humor-Best-All-Time

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UncleJohn3000
Community Member
1 week ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

One of my favorite take-your-own-self-down-a-notch phrases - "Have you ever actually looked at your web traffic?"

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#3

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Shaggy
Community Member
1 week ago (edited) DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

X1000... Thinking about what happens if there is an outage scares the c**p out of me. I mean, how will I be able to get the beer out of the smart fridge if it is locked in the smart garage inside the smart house if the inets go down??

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The r/ProgrammerHumor subreddit has over four million members. That's not really that surprising, given that as of 2024, there are around 28.7 million programmers around the world. The average salary for a software developer in the U.S. was about 108k in 2021, and the average yearly salary of a senior executive developer in the U.S. is about 225k in 2024.

The subreddit also has a few rules people have to follow if they want to be a part of the community. Posters have to share content that is funny or relatable to programmers, students, and anyone who aspires to be a programmer. "If somebody who has nothing to do with programming can see the humor in your post in the same way that a programmer would, then it's not programmer humor," the group's rules state.

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#6

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Me. Just Me.
Community Member
1 week ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

I've been saying this for a while. Being able to get AI to produce exactly what you want means you being able to describe exactly what you want. This is why most of these chat bits go off the rails after about the third interaction.

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The subreddit is also very clear about what programming-related content is and what it isn't. In short, tech humor doesn't equal programmer humor. "Operating system jokes, "Why does my printer never work" are all things related to technology, but not something that requires programming knowledge to see the humor in," the moderators clarify.

Indeed, not all people who work in tech are programmers. People can say they work in tech and be IT project managers, UX/UI designers, citizen developers, information architects, and AI operators. People often assume that programmers are just IT guys. r/ProgrammerHumor usually doesn't accept posts if they don't take a programmer to understand.

#7

Funny-Programmer-Humor-Best-All-Time

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Me. Just Me.
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1 week ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

Programming. A profession where programmers are literally as shocked as the rest of us when it actually works.

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Another interesting rule at r/ProgrammerHumor is to title posts in camelCase to improve readability. However, that can be a topic of contention in some programmer circles: some prefer to use underscores for identifiers. Luckily, there's even some scientific research to back up the superiority of camelCase.

#10

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Robert T
Community Member
1 week ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

I remember when I first started programming (aged 11) and the computer came up with the error "TYPE MISMATCH AT LINE 20". So I literally typed MISMATCH in a line 20. It didn't help! LOL

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Those who are pro-underscores claim that they resemble natural writing more; the underscores are stand-ins for spaces, making it easier for the eye to follow code. However, underscore haters say that it's just plain ugly: just compare "this_is_code" with "thisIsCode" and you'll see which one's way more elegant.

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#14

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Tim Fawcett
Community Member
1 week ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

No - in a real time time system like life, poop is handled as an exception thrown when necessary (insert throwing your poop joke here) so does not need to handled in the main loop. Of course if you don't include a throw(Poop) and catch(Poop) handler then you will end up with a massive core dump

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Researchers actually have done a study on which system is the most efficient. They observed 135 programmers and non-programmers who had to identify a matching phrase written in both systems. They found that camelCase has a higher (51.5%) probability of correctness, but it takes 13.5% longer to read than an underscore identifier.

#16

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Dragons Exist
Community Member
1 week ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

I once had a model called "on" and eventually found out that it was short for "dragon", because "drag" had already been taken

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#17

Funny-Programmer-Humor-Best-All-Time

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Robert T
Community Member
1 week ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

Ah, the mysterious extra file algorithm. Closely related to the Phase of the Moon algorithm.

Remi (He/Him)
Community Member
1 week ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

Closely related to when a small change to a simple card game resulted in a nifty computer rebooting tool. 😅

MaximumKarmaSaint
Community Member
1 week ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

As someone invested in the game, people tried this and found out that not only is the coconut completely fine and can be deleted without problem, however, they found out that ANOTHER file (most likely a cow) WILL stop the game from running, and no one knows why. A guy named Shuonic did a video on it, called "How many files can you delete before TF2 breaks?"

Laura Gillette
Community Member
1 week ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

Ah yes, the trusty load-bearing jpg of a coconut, who hasn't used one of those

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And what about the tabs vs. spaces debate? Well, maybe people don't dump their significant others over it like Richard Hendricks did in HBO's Silicon Valley, it's still a Holy War for some coders. Google Developer Advocate Felipe Hoffa actually did some research into this and found which programmers use more often.

Hoffa analyzed a billion files from the top 400,000 projects on GitHub in 2016. He found that spaces outpace tabs in every major programming language except C and Google's Go. The 2017 Stack Overflow Developer Survey also revealed that 40.7% of programmers use tabs, 41.8% use spaces, and 17.5% prefer to use both.

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#24

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Rich Bayless
Community Member
1 week ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

You can always use UTC instead ... problem solved ... and now nobody has any clue when that log entry actually happened! 🤪

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Interestingly, there's also a financial component to this. Apparently, coders who use spaces for indentation make more money, too. Even if they have the same amount of experience, those who use tabs make around $15k a year less than those who use spaces. Still, there's no guarantee that you're magically going to start earning more just because you started using spaces instead of tabs.

A very recent academic study set out to explore what makes programmers laugh. What's more fascinating, is that they used the r/ProgrammerHumor subreddit as the main source for their research. Its findings are not yet available, but in their abstract, the researchers state that the most popular submissions are those made in winter months in the northern hemisphere at 2-3 pm on the weekends, and are related to the "superiority and incongruity theories of humor."

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#28

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lluf eman
Community Member
1 week ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

It works only on Tuesday, but it seems to be a pretty decent result, because it means that it works properly on 52 (the number of Tuesdays in a year) days in a year, which is a very good result for a computer program, taking into account the fact that various studies indicate that Windows works on average up to 3.5 days without any error.

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#30

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Talis
Community Member
1 week ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

Being a senior myself, I think it's rude not to help other colleagues, especially new ones that still have a lot to learn. In my experience, they are doing their best to get up to speed. And in return, one gets valuable insights from a still "untainted" perspective.

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Note: this post originally had 98 images. It’s been shortened to the top 30 images based on user votes.

So, coder Pandas, what do you think about this best-of-all-time selection from the r/ProgrammerHumor subreddit? Don't forget to upvote your favorite funny pics so they can make it to the top of the list! And, in the meantime, if you want more programmer humor, check out our previous posts on the community herehereherehere, and right here!