What Makes Programmers Laugh? Exploring the Submissions of the Subreddit r/ProgrammerHumor is a forthcoming research article about peculiar the sense of humor evinced by people who identify as computer programmers and who gather at a subreddit dedicated to examples of that humor. "Multiple regression models were built to investigate what makes submissions humorous," the abstract informs us.
Background: Humor is a fundamental part of human communication, with prior work linking positive humor in the workplace to positive outcomes, such as improved performance and job satisfaction. Aims: This study aims to investigate programming-related humor in a large social media community. Methodology: We collected 139,718 submissions from Reddit subreddit r/ProgrammerHumor. Both textual and image-based (memes) submissions were considered. The image data was processed with OCR to extract text from images for NLP analysis. Multiple regression models were built to investigate what makes submissions humorous. Additionally, a random sample of 800 submissions was labeled by human annotators regarding their relation to theories of humor, suitability for the workplace, the need for programming knowledge to understand the submission, and whether images in image-based submissions added context to the submission. Results: Our results indicate that predicting the humor of software developers is difficult. Our best regression model was able to explain only 10% of the variance. However, statistically significant differences were observed between topics, submission times, and associated humor theories. Our analysis reveals that the highest submission scores are achieved by image-based submissions that are created during the winter months in the northern hemisphere, between 2-3pm UTC on weekends, which are distinctly related to superiority and incongruity theories of humor, and are about the topic of "Learning". Conclusions: Predicting humor with natural language processing methods is challenging. We discuss the benefits and inherent difficulties in assessing perceived humor of submissions, as well as possible avenues for future work. Additionally, our replication package should help future studies and can act as a joke repository for the software industry and education.
Note that the fun happens when Silicon Valley is asleep—the bosses, at least. The research article has already made it to that selfsame subreddit, in a post titled "weAreBeingStudied." Recursion is no joke! Know the dangers!
Guys, This our golden chance to fuck up their research. Who agrees with me??
My best programming joke follows, with respect to Jamie Zawinski's famed remark "Some people, when confronted with a problem, think "I know, I'll use regular expressions." Now they have two problems," which led to many variations and derivatives over the years. Here's mine:
Now they have two problems. Some people, when confronted with a problem, think "I know, I'll use Javascript."
(Uttered in the days before promises were kept.)
