Item:

 

“there are only two hard things in computer science: number 0, cache invalidation, number 1, naming things, number 7, asynchronous callbacks, and number 2, off by one errors”

 

 

• Oral Folklore: Joke
• English
• USA
• Collector: Jonah Deykin

 

Informant Data:

 

Trevor Davis is a Computer Science major in the Dartmouth class of 2018.  He is from Raleigh, North Carolina.

 

Contextual Data:

 

Social Context:

The informant heard this joke from some friends of his in a computer science class last year.  It was used both to add humor but also as a way of complaining about annoying problems encountered in computer science.

 

Cultural Context:

The joke is not accessible to those who are not computer scientists.  It relies on understanding technical problems that are common in computer code.  This joke allows the audience to gripe about problems many of them face often in a humorous way.

 

Item:

            Trevor Davis interview

Associated File:

Informants Comments:

 

The informant noted that the joke plays on different strange conventions and errors that are common in computer programming. For example, the list starts at 0, as all lists in computer science start with index 0.  The insertion of number 7 into the middle of the list plays on the fact that sometimes multiple processes are running at once so strange things can be inserted into the middle of the output.  The number 2 being an off by one error is joking that there were expected to only be two things listed

 

Collectors Comments:

 

The joke is very technical and requires more than a passing knowledge of computer science to understand

 

Collectors Name:

Jonah Deykin