Finding Humor in Software Development, Part I

I have run across a few posts recently that I have found funny. However, in finding amusement in these, I must admit some very small degree of personal nerdiness. I don't think, for example, that my wife would find these to be as amusing as I did. With the weekend rapidly approaching, this lighter blog post related to software development seemed apropos.


WHATWG Specification on Microblogging

Reddit user cycles recently posted I just noticed the HTML specification has a nice, subtle jab at microblogging, which already has well over 300 comments. The link is to WHATWG's HTML specification section on the input element's maximum length attribute. The referenced comment is funny because it provides a hypothetical example in this specification that states (I added the emphasis): "The following extract shows how a messaging client's text entry could be arbitrarily restricted to a fixed number of characters, thus forcing any conversation through this medium to be terse and discouraging intelligent discourse." The hypothetical example provided "happens" to feature a maxlength of 140, the Twitter character limit.


Legal Protections for Hello, World

Another Reddit user, leadline, posted Legal Overkill, which is a link to source code for HelloWorldApp. This one is funny because there are thirty lines of comments with disclaimers and licensing information for ten lines of "code" (five of which are Javadoc for the main method).

This, of course, is understandable as a likely result of some type of script being run across all code samples available from Oracle. It wouldn't be funny if there was some code of significant interest or risk involved, but it so happens that this code is simply the tired old Java Hello, World that has been around since the beginning of Java.


HTTP Status Code 418: I'm a teapot

I've known about this one for longer than the two mentioned previously, but have found it amusing. HTTP Status Codes, while useful in web and REST applications, are a relatively boring business. I think it's funny that some folks took enough time to create the Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol in a realistic fashion and assign it HTTP status code 418. Although this was an April Fools' Joke in 1998, it continues to play a joke on people even today. Google has been known to annually generate some good technically related Aprils Fools' Jokes.


Conclusion

The three examples mentioned in this post are primarily humorous to software developers. If humor can be found in HTTP status codes, Hello World applications, and a standard specification, we can likely find humor anywhere in our business.