I personally don’t find it funny because these types of jokes essentially boil down to “I used a concept outside of its context, and for that reason alone it is funny”. However, with a lot of these jokes the context is so narrow (i.e. programming) that they are almost universally not understood by wider audiences.
To reference a movie in common vocabulary is to bring it up in conversation.
Referencing in programming terms like C refers to assigning a value to a variable. You can re-assign those variables to new values and then de-reference (read) the new value.
They are conflating the common meaning of reference with the much more obscure programming definition (obscure at least among non-programmers).
Star wars = “no, I am your father” (reference)
Jaws = movie about hunting killer shark (reference)
Star wars = movie about hunting killer shark (OP is pretending we can treat movie references like variable references and re-assigns the star wars variable to mean something else)
“Hey, have you seen star wars? The movie about hunting a killer shark?” (De-referencing your newly re-assigned variable)
Can anyone explain the funny for me?
I personally don’t find it funny because these types of jokes essentially boil down to “I used a concept outside of its context, and for that reason alone it is funny”. However, with a lot of these jokes the context is so narrow (i.e. programming) that they are almost universally not understood by wider audiences.
I mean programmers is a pretty big audience. Sure this probably would pan at a comedy open mike night but it’s literally on programmer humor.
And using concept outside its normal concept or conflating two concepts is pretty standard humor.
Conflating two concepts can be funny (e.g. puns) but this isn’t that. “Dereferencing a movie ” has no meaning outside of manual memory management.
I understand humour is subjective but some jokes aren’t as strong as others (and some jokes aren’t jokes at all).
Referencing is the term that is being conflated.
Enough people apparently find this funny here. Not everyone needs to find every bit of comedy funny.
To reference a movie in common vocabulary is to bring it up in conversation.
Referencing in programming terms like C refers to assigning a value to a variable. You can re-assign those variables to new values and then de-reference (read) the new value.
They are conflating the common meaning of reference with the much more obscure programming definition (obscure at least among non-programmers).
Star wars = “no, I am your father” (reference) Jaws = movie about hunting killer shark (reference) Star wars = movie about hunting killer shark (OP is pretending we can treat movie references like variable references and re-assigns the star wars variable to mean something else) “Hey, have you seen star wars? The movie about hunting a killer shark?” (De-referencing your newly re-assigned variable)