programming humor

A roughly ten-minute demo of Microsoft's Intentional Programming research system, showing its editor and an unusual way of working with code. It is the first of two clips cut from a longer video.

Part 2 of an old Microsoft Research demo of Intentional Programming, showing the compiler side of a system that stores programs as abstract structure rather than text. The uploader says the companion editor clip is clearer.

The first lecture of Stanford's CS107 Programming Paradigms, taught by Jerry Cain, giving an overview of the course. The course goes from C and assembly through C++, concurrency, Scheme and Python.

First lecture of Stanford's CS106A Programming Methodology by Mehran Sahami, giving a course overview and starting on programming. The course teaches software engineering principles using Java.

Totally Gridbag is a short humorous animation about the frustrations of Java Swing's GridBagLayout, originally made as a Flash cartoon.

A 2008 Google Tech Talk in which Slava Pestov introduces Factor, a concatenative language influenced by Forth, Lisp and Smalltalk. It covers the interactive environment, metaprogramming, and the language's modern high-level features and libraries.

First lecture of MIT 6.00, an introductory computer science course taught in Python by Eric Grimson and John Guttag. It covers the goals of the course, what computation is, and data types, operators and variables.

Sean Parent of Adobe argues that object-oriented frameworks ultimately fail to deliver scalable, high quality software and proposes combining generic and declarative programming instead. It draws on Stepanov's Elements of Programming.

Julia Ecklar's recording of "The Eternal Flame," a filk song about God writing the universe in Lisp, written by Bob Kanefsky. It is a geek-humor song set to a familiar tune.

Rob Pike's October 2009 Google Tech Talk introducing Go, a new experimental systems language designed for fast builds, concurrency and garbage collection. It covers the goals, syntax and type system.

A comedy video in which a salesperson demands that a web developer fix a down website, with the two talking past each other. It won a Webby award.

A 2007 video of someone trying to write Perl code using Windows Vista's speech recognition, with hilariously bad results.

Doug Zongker's deadpan conference presentation of his famously chicken-filled paper, given at the 2007 AAAS humor session. It satirizes academic talks while showing the pitfalls of bad presentation.

Alan Kay demonstrates GRaIL, a graphical input language system from around 1968 in which hand-drawn strokes become boxes, connections and dataflow-style programs.

A short, absurd happy-hardcore song and animation celebrating the Bagger 288, the enormous bucket-wheel excavator, in dramatic over-the-top terms.

A sketch from the Norwegian NRK show Uti Var Hage poking fun at the Danish language and how hard it is to understand.

The first lecture of MIT's 1986 6.001 Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, given by Harold Abelson, introducing Lisp and the idea of computer science as the study of process.

An eight-minute excerpt of a 1983 video featuring Seymour Papert, creator of Logo, on children learning programming and abstract ideas through embodied play. It shows kids acting out the Logo turtle.

Economist-comedian Yoram Bauman delivers a humorous translation of Mankiw's ten principles of economics for the uninitiated. It was presented at the AAAS humor session in 2007.

Lecture 1B of MIT's 6.001 Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (1986) with Gerald Sussman, covering procedures, processes and the substitution model. It includes the line about the power of naming things.

Tom Lehrer's gallows-humor song about nuclear annihilation, in which everyone goes together when the bomb drops.

The classic MrWeebl animated music video Badgers, a short looping song of badgers, a mushroom and a snake. It is a staple of early internet absurdist humor.

A short 2007 demo of Pizza Party, a command line program that orders Domino's pizza from a UNIX-like terminal. The video shows the designers placing an order using the software.

A short Dyalog demonstration building Conway's Game of Life in a single line of APL, step by step. It shows how array operations replace loops.

Douglas Adams gives a talk at UCSB, recorded shortly before his death, about the odd lives of animals and what they suggest about humanity's future. It draws on his Last Chance to See work and is funny and wide-ranging.

Cal Henderson's DjangoCon 2008 keynote, "Why I Hate Django", is a funny critique of Django from a Flickr architect. It touches on scaling topics such as database replication.

Robert Martin's RailsConf 2009 talk looks at why Smalltalk lost out despite its technical strengths. He draws lessons about language communities and arrogance that he argues could hurt Ruby too.

A two-minute John Cleese monologue showing the pathology of extremism, explaining why it feels good and how it drives out moderates.

A spoof industrial promo for the Rockwell Retro Encabulator, a deadpan stream of technobabble about an imaginary machine. It is a classic engineering in-joke.

In an IT Crowd episode clip, Moss and Roy convince Jen that the internet is a small black box. She believes it and carries it around.

A one-minute clip from The IT Crowd in which the characters hear a jingle for a memorable emergency phone number.

A fan-made music video for Jonathan Coulton's song 'Code Monkey', about the life of a programmer, using World of Warcraft footage. It was made by Mike Spiff Booth.

An excerpt from Hal Abelson's opening SICP lecture introducing computer science and contrasting declarative and imperative knowledge. He argues that computer science is not really a science and is more like magic or engineering of ideas.

A brief demo of the Smalltalk debugger, including defining a method that doesn't exist yet while the program is stopped mid-crash.

A mashup of a Sesame Street Count clip with a Lemon Demon song, where the swear words are censored in absurd ways. It is a short comedy piece about censorship.

A short clip of President George W. Bush stumbling through the saying 'fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me'.

A one-minute clip of Scotty from Star Trek giving advice to engineers about managing expectations in estimates. It is a comedic bit of workplace wisdom.

A short clip of Richard Stallman singing the free software song, recorded during a visit to Ecuador.

The classic 'What have the Romans ever done for us?' scene from Monty Python's Life of Brian, in which revolutionaries grudgingly list the benefits of Roman rule. It is a short comedy clip.

A one-minute clip from the movie The Big Hit showing a gangster explaining how a trace buster works.