Ancient Web: A Software Professor’s Joke Page Kept the Bugs In

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.

Software engineers have been accused of turning everything off and on again for decades. John W. McCormick's joke collection includes an even older remedy: if the car brakes fail, push it back up the hill and see whether the problem repeats.

Read Software Engineering Humor.

Hosted under the University of Northern Iowa's computer-science domain, the page strings together jokes about programmers, hardware engineers, managers and the languages they use. One story contrasts a manager's enthusiasm for meetings with a hardware engineer's willingness to fix the broken car. The software engineer prefers reproducing the problem.

A longer piece pretends that Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie and Brian Kernighan have confessed that Unix and C were an elaborate joke. That is a fictional parody, not an actual admission by the creators of those technologies. Its humor depends on the old rivalry between powerful tools and their frequently puzzling interfaces.

An industry speaking in inside jokes

The page also gathers quotations about C and C++, including complaints about complexity, type systems, debugging and the dangers of giving programmers too much control. Some quotes are attributed to recognizable computing figures such as Edsger Dijkstra and C. A. R. Hoare; others have less certain provenance. Readers should not treat every familiar quotation on a joke page as authenticated historical speech.

The bottom of the document links translations into numerous languages. Those links are part of the page's later accumulation and some may no longer lead to useful copies. They are not evidence of the collection's initial publication date.

McCormick's personal university homepage identifies him as a professor who retired in July 2015 and lists books and laboratory work on real-time embedded systems and Ada programming. The humor page belongs to that academic personal-Web environment, not to a commercial joke-content farm.

An exact creation date for this particular collection could not be established, so its eligibility rests on its surviving old-style academic presentation and period-specific jokes about Unix, C++, and computer management rather than an invented year.

There is something historically useful about seeing a profession laugh at its own tools. The jokes preserve the frustrations, assumptions and rituals that formal programming textbooks rarely mention.

Browse the original joke and quotation collection.

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.