The history of computers and software is full of nerdy and obscure jokes well beyond the caricatures of exiting vim. Complier compiler (explain that to most people!) to yet another compiler compiler to bison is one of those.
What are your favourite obscure computer nerd jokes?
GNU’s Not UNIX
PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor
WINE Is Not an Emulator
Less is more.
my favorite name origin for a bit of software relates to the text editor nano. nano was written as a standalone clone of Pico, as a play on metric prefixes, but Pico is actually Pine compositor, part of Pine, an email client. Pine itself was based on an earlier email client called Elm, and has been attributed as various recursive acronyms such as ‘Pine Is Nearly Elm’
cat (as in concatenate)
prints a file to stdouthead & tail print the beginning / end of a file
Not so much of a joke as a cute story. There was once a programmer with a dog named Biff who would bark at the mailman every time he delivered the mail. The programmer wrote a program to monitor incoming email and beep when you got a message, and named it biff.
What? and I am a programmer 😅
Compiler compiler (cc) -> yet another compiler compiler (yacc) -> bison (because yacc sounds like “yak”)
