Best XKCD About Software Engineering 🔗

This is my selection of best xkcd comics about software engineering.

Sandwich 🔗

Explanation: The sudo command lets authorized UNIX users override access rights by executing a command as the root user.

e to the pi times i 🔗

Explanation: Euler’s identity states that e^(iπ) + 1 = 0.

Random Number 🔗

Explanation: Most functions of this form are random number generators, meaning that on subsequent calls they return different random numbers.

Compiling 🔗

Explanation: Compiling has one computer system read through the man-written code and (barring errors) produce the equivalent stand-alone and direct machine-readable code, suitable for a given range of computers.

Exploits of a Mom 🔗

Explanation: As the full name is read into the school’s system’s databases without data sanitization, it causes the “Students” table in the database to be dropped, meaning it gets deleted.

Nerd Sniping 🔗

Explanation: People have a way of getting distracted easily and focusing on one thing and ignoring the rest, when they feel their specific skills are challenged by an interesting problem.

Travelling Salesman Problem 🔗

Explanation: Given a list of cities and the distances between pairs of them, the task is to find the shortest possible route that visits each city exactly once and then returns to the origin city.

Correlation 🔗

Explanation: For example, if you tallied the sales of sunglasses and incidence of skin cancer by region, you would probably find that there is a high positive correlation. That is, in locations where many people buy sunglasses, there are also many cases of skin cancer.

Students 🔗

Explanation: Students often dream they have assignments they have forgotten about that are due in a very short time period, leaving no time to complete the assignment, thus filling them with the feeling of impending failure.

Standards 🔗

Explanation: Technical standards exist so that industries could avoid wasting resources reinventing the wheel, whilst offering their clients a certain amount of simplicity and compatibility between vendors.

Password Strength 🔗

Explanation: Entropy is a measure of “uncertainty” in an outcome. A value representing how unpredictable the next character of a password is.

Language Nerd 🔗

Explanation: Creates new meanings from existing words:

• uses the adjective “legit” (a slang abbreviation of “legitimate”) as an adverb to mean “legitimately”
• uses the noun “adverb” as a verb meaning “to turn a non-adverb into an adverb”
• uses the noun phrase “language nerd” as an adjective

DNA 🔗

Explanation: By studying the source code for a program, a person can often understand why it does what it does, and make effective and fundamental changes to the program’s operation. Looking at some obfuscated source code may make it clearer how misleading even simple looking code can be, and how unreadable correct and well working code can be.

Fixing Problems 🔗

Explanation: Due to the complex relationships within a program or other system, making an alteration can cause problems with other parts of the program. This can lead to a seemingly small “fix” becoming a long chain of debugging and consecutive fixes.

Logical 🔗

Explanation: Since he refers to all people in general and since he falls in the same trap as he complains about, using his feelings for his case instead of logic and science, his argument is both fallacious and hypocritical.

Base Rate 🔗

Explanation: The base rate fallacy is a type of error in which people are presented with the rate at which something occurs throughout an entire population along with more specific information about a subset of that population, and tend to ignore the whole-population information in favor of the specific information.

Garden Path Sentence 🔗

Explanation: A garden-path sentence is one in which the first or most obvious attempt at parsing the beginning of a sentence leads to the wrong meaning, causing confusion when the sentence is completed.

After (bird strikes)1, (judge)2, (who ordered)3 (olive garden-path sentence)4 in (case of green walkways)5 (vacated)3, (overturned but rights and lands safely.)2

• “bird strikes”: Airplane colliding with birds in flight, or alternatively “bird strikes” could refer to the strikes called by the Bird union that this judge was known for or involved in the ruling of.
• “judge … overturned but rights and lands safely”: The judge (and presumably the plane they were in) flipped over but was able to get right-side up again and land safely.
• “who ordered [the sentence to be] vacated”: Identifies the judge as one who issued a ruling cancelling an earlier ruling.
• “olive garden path sentence”: The thing that was cancelled was a punishment related to a path in an olive garden.
• “case of green walkways”: The punishment was in a court case about shared-use walkways (likely the same paths listed above, which may have been placed in an olive garden).