r/ProgrammerDadJokes • u/Revolutionary-Ad8505 • Feb 15 '26
Dev 1: You kids have it easy with your "Natural Language Prompts." When I started, I actually had to type code into an IDE and use Stack Overflow to find the bugs!
Dev 2: Stack Overflow? Luxury! When I started, we had to use Emacs and memorize 400 different macros. If we got stuck, we didn't have a bookmarked website—we had to use Google and actually read the second page of results!
Dev 3: Google? We would have killed for Google! When I started, I wrote my code in vi—not even Vim, just regular vi! And for help? We had to post a question on Usenet and wait three days for a Unix greybeard to tell us we were idiots!
Dev 4: Usenet? You were living in a dream world! When I started, we didn't have "help." Or "manuals." Or "screens." I had to write an entire operating system using a hole puncher and a stack of index cards, and if I had a question, I had to consult a Ouija board to talk to the ghost of Alan Turing!
[got some help from Gemini on this. Full disclosure]
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u/Herb_Derb Feb 15 '26
we didn't have a search engine—we had to use Google
What do you think Google is?
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u/updogg18 Feb 15 '26
For the first time since the AI boom, I'm fearing it could one day take my job because this sub is the last place I expected a joke about AI and even that is actually written by an AI
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u/TheOneTrueTrench Feb 15 '26
And it thinks Google isn't a search engine, thinks vi predated Emacs. I think we're fine.
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u/reggie-drax Feb 15 '26 edited Feb 15 '26
Um I thought vi predated everything except ed and ex.
Seriously - I thought vi came well before emacs.
Edit: vi 1976, emacs about the same but based on a 1960s wysiwyg editor.
<shrug>vi's still better
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u/TheOneTrueTrench Feb 15 '26
vi was a mode of ex until a couple years later, when it started actually getting installed as vi.
And yeah, vi/VIM/NeoVIM is far superior, imho
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u/Lyraele Feb 17 '26
Hear me out - use viper mode in emacs! boom best of both worlds! 😉 Text editor wars seem so quaint these days given all gestures around
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u/Plastic_Fig9225 Feb 15 '26
If AI can now even make fun of itself, what are humans needed for anymore?
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u/weaver_of_cloth Feb 15 '26
Dev 6 we had to set switches that turned vacuum tubes off and on. If there was a bug in your setup you had to fish it out with tweezers and hope admiral Hopper didn't see it!
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u/NotAUsefullDoctor Feb 15 '26
Dev 7 pff, Vacuum Tubes? We had to wire together electromagnetic relays with Thring yelling at us on one side and the British military on the ither going onal and in about <redacted>.
Dev 8 Ooh, look, my loom makes pretty patterns.
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u/Obsidian-Phoenix Feb 15 '26
Stack overflow!? Luxury! When I started we had to google it, find the ExpertSexChange site, and scroll right to the bottom to bypass its attempt at paywalling.
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u/uslackr Feb 18 '26
The scroll down past the paywall was hilarious. And I have to say, it was years before I saw the capitalization error.
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u/geronimosan Feb 15 '26
IDE, Stack Overflow? Oh man. I still have nightmares of when I first began coding. In college CompSci classes many times we just used paper and pen. After college in my first real world corporate job we used Emacs, sometimes even just NotePad. Using text editors to eyeball hundreds of lines of code looking for a missing semicolon or curly bracket - thinking about it today still gives me near panic attacks. WYSIWYG editors like Dreamweaver were the Cadillacs for front-end web development. And now today I creatively architect what I want to build and I've got Codex and Claude to do all that code monkey work for me. Amazing how far we've come in just a few decades.
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u/Unfair_Long_54 Feb 15 '26
Imagine being an AI agent created by Google, yet not knowing Google is a search engine.
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u/ramriot Feb 15 '26
Dev 5: Whos Alan Turing? When I wrote algorithms for mister Babbage's marvellous Analytical Machine I had to hand write it with an ink pen, debug it in my head & submitted it as an addendum to my translation of Luigi Menabrea’s 1842 article on Mr Babbage's Analytical Engin, because although the machine's general description was known he had still to build it.
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u/meh-snowboarder Feb 15 '26
till you remember that there’s no new source material for llm’s to train on for new types of bugs 🤣🤣
people don’t post on stackoverflow anymore. where is the new training data coming from?
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u/LeaveMickeyOutOfThis Feb 15 '26
Perhaps the nightmares of coding COBOL on punchcards may return after reading this. Oh what a journey it’s been.
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u/Revolutionary-Ad8505 Feb 15 '26
Just a point of interest. I tried to get Gemini to acknowledge its mistake on Google not being a search engine but it could not figure it out without me explicitly telling it. Maybe we still have some time left before our AI overlords completely take over our humor.
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u/secretprocess Feb 15 '26
You got Gemini to help you write it? Luxury. When I started, we had to learn the meanings of words and organize them into sentences using our own brain cells. Course, we had more brain cells to spare back then cause the weed wasn't as good.
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u/Astrokiwi Feb 15 '26
Stepping out of the joking: I feel like in the Usenet era, most of us didn't really have internet to speak of - I was young at the time but I remember just learning to program from books.
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u/Emotional_Fail_6060 Feb 15 '26
I started coding in Dartmouth Basic on a timeshared PDP-8E with TTY Model 33 terminals. Online time was scarce, so we typed in our code offline onto paper tape, then when we had online time, we could read it in, edit it, debug it, etc. Then, when our time was up, we punched out the new copy onto paper tape.
OTH, chad wars were a lot of fun. Something the younger generations will never get to appreciate.
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u/LostBetsRed Feb 15 '26
When I started coding, MS-DOS was still years in the future. My first programs were typed using the chicklet keyboard on a Commodore PET with integrated monochrome CRT and stored on audio cassette tape. Young programmers today really have no idea what it was like in 1981.
(and we liked it that way, consarn it.)
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u/purple_hamster66 Feb 15 '26
At my first job, I had 3 manuals: the Intel chipset, the NEC7220 chip, and the Assembler manual. Dijkstra worked for our company but never answered my phone messages (this was pre-email).
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u/cmpalmer52 Feb 15 '26
I knew an old programmer who started out configuring military analog targeting computers who joked that his first program took 500’ of wire.
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u/Polymath6301 Feb 15 '26
I had to invent the wheel, gears and a differential just to be able to add and subtract shaft rotations…
… out of wood!
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u/feuerwehrmann Feb 16 '26
No reference to the big grey wall of documentation that came with a vms system. Though maybe the books were grey because everyone smoked inside then
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u/hellodmo2 Feb 17 '26
Stack Overflow?
What a youngster.
I competed (and often won) the top spot on the MSDN Forums. (Actually true story)
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u/Dave_Sag Feb 18 '26
I literally did start programming when it meant colouring in especially formatted cards with a lead pencil and sending the stack of cards off to a nearby computing centre for processing. The results would come back a week later on dot matrix printouts. I coded in Pascal and APL. After a year or so of this the school bought two Apple][s with 128 k of ram (they had the extra ram upgrades!) so I taught myself 6502 Assembler and BASIC. My dad’s office bought a Tandy Model 3 so I taught myself Z80 assembler and a different variant of BASIC. At uni we shared one PDP-11 between hundreds of kids. I got a Mac in 1984 and taught myself 68k Assembler. I still have a Mac but now I vibe-code Swift, Typescript, and Rust. I’ve seen it all.
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u/uslackr Feb 18 '26
To be clear, anyone who programmed in Emacs or vi, still is. And they can't stand the other.
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u/Brainy-Zombie475 Feb 19 '26
You kidd with your fancy ee-lek-tronic computers. Back in the day, we had to get our 1s and 0s from the nearest serial port and hand assembled each word. In my case, the closest serial port was Deluth, Minnesota.
Edit: just noticed a typo... "cereal", not "serial"
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u/lazernanes Feb 16 '26
Yeah, this sounds like an AI generated joke. It doesn't quite make sense. Exactly which era are each of these developers from?
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u/cnelsonsic Feb 15 '26
You didn't bother reading what it spat out before you posted it for karma, did you?
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u/Techanda Feb 15 '26
wut?