Note: This blog post follows the modern recipe style – a load of unimportant background history before presenting the real content. So, just hit page-down a few times if that’s what you came here for, I won’t be offended.
Just over 10 years ago, fellow ACCU member Jez Higgins replied to another one of my programming one-liners on Twitter with a flippant remark that I probably had enough material now for an entire conference talk…
Lightning TalksThe ACCU conference generally hosts 90 minute talks. Of course, there was no way anybody would sit through that length of session, even if I had the relevant amount of “quality” programming puns, and if the conference committee were crazy enough to accept it as a serious proposal.
However, another popular feature of the ACCU conference were the lightning talks, which were only 5 minutes long and held at the end of each day. The barrier to entry there was considerably lower too as they could cover virtually any topic. Also, I’d already given a few of these in the past, all with programming related humour being the general theme, e.g.
2010: Recycle Bin 101 – a Room 101 affair featuring some of Microsoft’s tools which refused to die gracefully back then, such as Visual C++ 6, Visual SourceSafe, and IE 6.
2012: Not Only, But Also – a riff on the #NOSQL, and #NOESTIMATES movements featuring my own variation: #NOSHIT.
2014: The Art of Code – a selection of code snippets framed as art, along with humorous titles. (This was inspired by Chopin’s Waterloo at the Pompidou Centre in Paris.)
2014: Requiem for Windows XP – a recital of Rutger Hauer’s final words in Bladerunner followed by the shutdown screen for Windows XP to mark its demise by Microsoft as it had finally reached its official end of life.
An Actual Comedy Routine
With Jez’s tweet in mind I decided that for 2015 I would go for a more formal stand-up comedy routine and read out what I hoped were some of my “best” and most appropriate puns for the ACCU conference demographic, which are typically highly technical programmers, largely from the C++ community, and mostly of a certain “vintage”. With the rise of the agile movement in full swing at the time, “The Daily Stand-Up” seemed like the perfect play on words to use for the title. The set of 30 or so puns were delivered in a deadpan style to an audience of 300+ attendees, and the reaction was such that I considered it a success and definitely worthy of further attempts in the future.
Over subsequent years I “performed” similar routines at Agile of the Beach, the Equal Experts Christmas Party, Agile in the City Birmingham, NorDevCon, my Spektrix leaving do, and most recently, the D language conference. While they were mostly only an occasional gig or two, the lightning talks at the ACCU conference became a more regular fixture (aside from the Covid years when it wasn’t run / was purely online).
10 Years Later
And so here I am, a decade later, at the ACCU 2025 conference with another mixture of programming puns which features some old favourites, more recent material, and even some as-yet-unpublished (i.e. not tweeted, yet) material. So, if you missed out on the “live performance”, or are simply a glutton for punishment, then you can relive the experience (groans and winces entirely optional) by reading these to yourself. Enjoy!?
“The background AI in my text editor just asked me if they were ‘paying you to write this crap?’ I thought that was a bit harsh, but then remembered I’d enabled dark mode.”
“I’ve started creating a typeface where each glyph is a different page from Wikipedia. It’s going to be the font of all knowledge.”
“If Bitcoin is value realized as ones and zeroes, does that effectively make it Gold Boolean?”
“Have you noticed that you never get a simple yes/no answer from people in the Tri-State area?”
“If I join the front-end channel, back-end channel, database channel, and operations channel, does that make me a Full Slack Developer?”
“Now I do more working from home I like to get my kids to help me with my coding. I call it au pair programming.”
“The trouble with pair programming in C++ is that your codebase becomes littered with .first and .second.”
“Our company is a big fan of the Pimpl Idiom. They like to hire spotty teenagers that vibe code C++.”
“I’ve always felt algorithms that round down to the nearest integer are inherently floored.”
“When first learning C++ I was given advice that I should ‘do as the ints do’. So now I make sure my code behaves slightly differently on different platforms.”
“Is a Polyglote a programmer that boasts about how many programming languages they know?”
“I once asked the Enterprise Architect if there were any non-function requirements? He said; yes, you can’t use Lisp, Haskell, F#, Elm, …”
“He clearly favoured an object oriented approach –anything we wanted to try that was different, he’d simply object.”
“I wonder if Google have postponed the next major version of their popular programming language after Dijkstra asserted that Go 2 is considered harmful?”
“I was really excited to discover Tony Hoare and Dennis Ritchie were giving a talk about two of their most influential contributions to Computer Science, but quickly became disappointed when my tickets arrived and said ‘Null & Void’.”
“People who are PRINCE certified just want to run projects like it’s 1999.”
“I recently tried to use an LLM to write some code to produce a digital certificate, but it just made a hash of it.”
“The infosec team asked us if we regularly rotate our keys. I told them that we often do that by passing them through ROT-13.”
“I once debated with Alonzo, the creator of Lambda Calculous, about whether lambdas and closures were the same thing. He said ‘no’, and that’s when I discovered there was a clear separation between Church and state.”
“We’re really regretting hiring this guy Sisyphus as a DBA, everything he does just gets rolled back!”
“In the battle between relational and document oriented databases, I think it was when SQL introduced the PIVOT function that the tables were turned.”
“We recently recruited a prompt engineer. It’s great that he’s in the office every day at 9am sharp, but then he spends the rest of the day tweaking the PS1 variable in his Bash config.”
“Have you ever noticed that off-by-one errors know no bounds?”
“The Wildlife Trust has deemed our codebase a conservation area on account of the number of bugs.”
“Our product owner asked why our acceptance tests only cover the happy path. I told him it’s because they’re rose-tinted specs.”
“The Marketing department said we needed to be more disruptive, so I dropped the production database and deleted all the source code.”
“The other day I passed a chap typing fast and furiously to try and quit his text editor. I think he was called Vim Diesel.”
“I reckon my colleagues only find my jokes amusing when I’m in the office. At least, I think that’s what they meant by ‘you’re not remotely funny’.”
