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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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."