Various Math + Software

1. What is set theory?

When there are five people in the room and seven are leaving, two will have to enter the room, so that it becomes empty.


2. Why did the chicken cross the road?

Chickens at rest tend to stay at rest. Chickens in motion tend to cross the road.

3. Werner Heisenberg, Kurt Godel and Noam Chomsky walk into a bar.
Heisenberg looks around the bar and says, "Because there are three of us and because this is a bar, it must be a joke. But the question remains, is it funny or not?"
And Godel thinks for a moment and says, "Well, because we're inside the joke, we can't tell whether it's funny. We'd have to be outside looking at it."
And Chomsky looks at both of them and says, "Of course it's funny. You're just telling it wrong."

5.
# In C we had to code our own bugs. In C++ we can inherit them.
# C gives you enough rope to hang yourself. C++ also gives you the tree object to tie it to.
# Unix is user friendly. It's just very particular about who it's friends are.

4. Real software engineers...

* Real software engineers don't write applications programs, they implement algorithms.
* Real software engineers don't debug programs, they verify correctness.
* Real software engineers like C's structured constructs, but they are suspicious of it because they have heard that it lets you get "close to the machine."
* Real software engineers work from 9 to 5, because that is the way the job is described in the formal spec. Working late would feel like using an undocumented external procedure.