Chris Oldwood🧵of my ACCU 2025 conference* programming one-liners lightning talk. Each pun individually wrapped for your consumption / appreciation / retooting / disdain :o).
* accuconference.org
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.
samir, an unknown quantityI 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.