A Decade of Lightning Talks with Programming One-Liners

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.

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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 Talks

The 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: are they 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 frontend channel, backend 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: yes, 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 that as a company 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 when they said: you’re not remotely funny.”

Wit Limits

I’ve used the lightning talks at the last two ACCU conferences as a means of subjecting a captive audience to my dreadful array of programming / IT / geek one liners. (My previous two ACCU stand-up routines are published on this blog as “The Daily Stand-Up” and “Stand-Up and Deliver”.) This year was no different, but I wasn’t sure if I had enough “decent” new or unused material to survive the whole 5 minutes; unluckily for the audience I had...

Hence, here are the 34 one-liners I delivered under the title “Wit Limits”  [1] at this year’s ACCU conference:

“I thought it was odd when the doctor prescribed ‘programming’ to help me cope with my migraine; then I realised he said ‘codeine’.”

“These news reports of drone strikes are quite disturbing, but what I don’t understand is why we allowed delivery bots to form unions in the first place.”

“When we have chips at the seaside and I run out of ketchup I like to go round dipping them in other people’s. I call it crowd saucing.”

“The marketing department said we needed to be more disruptive, so I dropped the production database and deleted all the source code.”

“Our product doesn’t have a road map, it has a star map. Each release depends on whatever new shiny thing the developers become infatuated with next.”

“We’ve recently started using CRC cards. We now add a 32-bit checksum to each user story to stop the product owner messing with it mid-sprint.”

“Our Scrum Master is forever asking what we did yesterday, what we’re doing today, and what our impediments are. He’s a big fan of continuous interrogation.”

“I’ve always been envious of the autonomy granted to James Bond, but I guess that’s what you get when you’re M-powered.”

“Teams that refuse to do planning poker have really gone up in my estimation.”

“I’ve always felt it’s important to allow slack time in a schedule. I mean, how else are you going to keep up with all the instant messages?”

“The problem with people who are Prince certified is that they want to manage projects like it’s 1999.”

“Someone recently told me there is a new build system written entirely in F#, but I reckon it’s just Fake news.”

“I know he invented object-orientation, but was the Hexagonal Architecture also invented by Alan Key?”

“Guido seemed somewhat subdued when I asked him about how the Python enhancement process was going, so I gave him a PEP talk.”

“I recently went to see beauty and the beast; a system where the back-end was written in Python and the front-end in JavaScript.”

“I once worked at an online china shop. The CEO said we needed to move fast and break things, so I hired a bull.”

“The problem with Amazon’s Dynamo DB is that it stops working when they stop peddling it.”

“Companies that securely store my important data in offsite data centres really get my back up.”

“Vampires never use database replication as they can’t see their data in the mirror.”

“The other day a sysadmin asked me what I was using to provision hardware; he said that he was using Terraform. I replied, ‘Application Form’.”

“Whenever I provision some new hardware I like to do it in batches of a hundred. My motto is ‘infra-penny, infra-pound’.”

“Calvin Klein once offered me a modelling contract but I had to turn it down when I discovered they still used Rational Rose.”

“The other day I felt really uncomfortable after we had a massive disagreement about whether to use dashes or slashes to prefix our console app switches. I hate command line arguments.”

“I like to think of myself as a pragmatist. When the code doesn’t compile due to warnings, I just pragma them out.“

“I reckon Vim should be classified as a Class A drug on the grounds that it’s impossible to quit.”

“I’m pretty disappointed that my ZX81 based mule racing game keeps falling over. I guess I shouldn’t have called it 1K Donkey.”

“Surely to create safe self-driving cars we first have to solve the Halting Problem?”

“Never use someone that can’t write regular expressions to perform jobs interviews – they tend to be a bad judge of character.”

“When Robocop eats breakfast in the morning does he use his cereal port?”

“If you hit the Levis REST API twice, on endpoints they haven’t implemented, you’ll get a pair of 501’s.”

“The last time my wife and I tried to plait my daughter’s hair concurrently it ended in dreadlock.”

“Someone has been sending me tiny photos of my bank’s login page. I think I’m being subjected to a micro-fiching attack.”

“The last time I hired a rowing boat I could turn left and turn right, but not move forwards or backwards. I reckon it must have had exclusive oars.”

“I’ve always felt it’s important that my kids are well grounded so when they go to bed at night I attach a wire from their ear to the radiator.”

 

[1] I also used this title for an “agile” focused routine at Agile in the City: Birmingham the month before. However the less said about this performance the better...

The Daily Stand-Up

At the ACCU Conference this year I managed to fulfil a lifelong ambition - do a stand-up comedy routine. OK, so it was only 5 minutes long (I did it as a lightning talk) and the audience and content was heavily programmer centric, but even so it seemed to go down a treat. A few people asked me to post the “set” that I did, so here it is.

The content all comes from my own tweets between 2009 and 2013 (except for a couple of more recent ones). Whilst this is the majority of the elapsed time I’ve been on Twitter, it only accounts for half of my tweets so far. This is because I was tweeting less than 100 times per-month at the beginning whereas I’m well over 400 per-month these days. Who says I’m an addict. It also means there should be enough content to do another routine next year (you have been warned).

I’d like to believe that it’s all my own work but the phenomena that is Cryptomnesia suggests this likely won’t be the case. Even if many are my own original thoughts it’s very likely others have been there well before me. Still I hope that you find some originality somewhere in this batch of 30 or so quips and puns.

If you’re trying to recreate the atmosphere of the original event then you’ll need to deliver these in a deadpan manner.

“My wife bought me some jigsaws of famous computer scientists for Christmas. She asked how I was getting on. I said: it’s Turing complete.”

“I think Turing was a wicked mathematician and computer scientist. In fact I’d say he was da bombe.”

“Speaking of mathematicians, when they work-out do they focus on their abs?”

“Was the Tower of Pisa built using lean manufacturing?”

“I know agile is all the rage but I think the writing is on the wall for kanban boards.”

“Are cross-functional teams just a bunch of grumpy LISP programmers.”

“I’ve been writing more functional code lately. I recently tried a few numerical recipes with currying functions, but all I got was a NaN.”

“The recent census had a box marked ‘Religion’. So I put ‘TDD’.”

“Why are we surprised that Git developers are so fanatical when everything they do is dictated by a SHA?”

“I’m getting the hang of mocking. During the last code review I said ‘this is rubbish!’, ‘what were you thinking?’ and ‘are you an idiot?’”

“When I work from home I like to get the kids involved with my coding. I call it Au Pair Programming.”

“Just because it’s called code doesn’t mean it has to be cryptic.”

“If technical debt is taking shortcuts, does that make bad programmers loan sharks?”

“Our code is so bad we don’t say ‘here be dragons’, we say ‘here be weeping angels’ because every time you blink the code looks worse.”

“I blame Facebook for the quality of SQL produced by young developers. They’re obsessed with likes.”

“When I see ‘static’ used in multi-threaded code it makes my hair stand on end.”

“I like the actor model for handling concurrency, but I find it suboptimal due to the constant need to talk to their agents.”

“I’ve been refactoring my code towards a more single-entry/single-exit style. It worked out well in the beginning but now there’s less impact due to the law of diminishing returns.”

“Singletons are like onions, the moment you touch one you end up in tears.”

“Inexperienced programmers are like inexperienced swimmers, they rely too heavily on floats.”

“I’m not saying the C programming standard is loose but I reckon it should be called Subjective-C.”

“C++ comes with complexity guarantees. If you write C++ it’s guaranteed to be complex.”

“Our system has five-nines reliability. It usually works about 45% of the time.”

“When Sherlock Holmes talks about a three-pipe problem does he mean it requires grep, sed, awk and sort?”

“My daughter asked what ABBA stands for. I said 43,962.”

“Once I pulled into an overflow car park and found myself right back at the entrance.”

“I don’t understand the point of graph databases. There must be an easier way to draw a bar chart.”

“Isn’t it depressing that everything we create ends up in a folder called ‘bin’.”

“If a team mate tells you to use more lynx they mean you have a problem with body odour, not that you need to test you web site with a text-only browser.”

“If you’re going to write a résumé for a C++ job don’t forget to add your cv-qualifiers.”

“I’ve enlisted the help of Simon Cowell to help me manage my passwords. It’s called X-Factor authentication.”

“Our interfaces are less cohesive and more adhesive. Developers keep sticking new methods on the end.”

“Our codebase has so many try/catch blocks that it often feels like a game of throwns.”

“When Amazon start using drones to deliver parcels I’m going to mess with them by sticking a robots.txt on the front door.”