Perl is for idiots: Programming language stereotypes
Coders argue about languages like gearheads argue about car brands. Think of Perl and C++ like Ford and Chevy. Some characterizations gleaned from the Joel on Software forum and the helpful, exhaustive list, Shooting yourself in the foot in various programming languages:

• C++: "A good way to turn a 1-month project into a 12-month project;" "masochist language."
• Lisp: Ugly, old, and full of parentheses.
• Ruby on Rails: For webheads who think it's God's gift to programming. (See this RoR joke.)
• Visual Basic: Cute to play with if you're not a programmer
• Java: Clogs up a computer's memory (remember those old Yahoo Java games that would break your browser?)

Unix is funny, and not just for ball jokes
Almost 90% of the world runs Windows, but the geeks who run the world often wrangle with hardier operating systems. Here's a breakdown:

• Windows: Windows jokes center around the OS's bloated size, proprietary nature, and unfixable errors.
• OS X: Apple's latest OS doesn't elicit many jokes, now that the Mac is no longer a toy.
• Unix: The preferred OS for running servers and shared workstations. Jokes center around puns using Unix commands and clueless users.
• Linux: The open-source OS used in all sorts of devices, with variants that do a decent job running a PC. Linux can arguably do everything (except games, movies, and anything "fun"), so Linux jokes are about how much Windows blows.

Confederacy of dunces: The human characters

• The programmer: As Valleywag's Paul Boutin explained, geek humor follows logic because that's how the geek mind (or a computer, and isn't that the same?) works. The most-spotted species of logical geek is the programmer. Thus logic-based jokes like: "How do you trap a programmer in the shower? Give him shampoo that says 'lather, rinse, repeat.'"
• The project manager: Doesn't do anything but earns more than the programmers. Not necessarily dumb, but not helpful. Best joke: the monkey joke.
• The sysadmin: The guy who runs UNIX. Picture Comic Book Guy reigning over his domain, and check out these variants.
• The Microsoft, Intel, and Sun programmers: See here.

Nick Douglas writes for Valleywag, Blogebrity, and Look Shiny. The only language he writes is English.

This weekend, PBWiki founder and coder Dave Weekly hosted the ninth in his grand series of SuperHappyDevHouses (where guests have included the inventor of the mouse, and where each iteration is unpredictable, like a fractal and unlike a King of Queens episode).

SHDH is an irregularly scheduled weekend coding session in the Peninsula town of Hillsborough. It lasts all Saturday night, with some coders staying up til dawn. I was lucky enough to get stuck there overnight and witness the whole shebang, which everyone called the "most productive" devhouse, especially for its size.

These three hung out on the stairway for a few hours, like a very hot, female, Asian Cerberus. Actually, not like Cerberus at all.

Yes, Scott Beale and Neil Kumar heard your little "Two black guys and a white programmer walk into a bar" joke. No, the punchline was not appropriate at all.

Lest you think geeks don't have sex — that night netted not one but two condoms in the trashcan of the cramped downstairs (I think. Maybe the roomier upstairs) bathroom. Granted, only one is confirmed to have been used on a girl, but still, way to go, developers!

After the jump, things more boring than bathroom sex. But they are still good things.

Photos: SHDH 9 [Elea Chang on Flickr]
SuperHappyDevHouse [Official wiki]

Dave Weekly. Organizer. Man of mystery. Commie.

"I appreciate you trying to help, it's really cute. But let's face it, boys can't code."

Val Henson (above) whipped up a nifty app that combs SEC data for unlikely financial data. The tool compares a company's reported financial numbers to the actual distribution of normal financial data. Given enough data, the figures that skew wrong (Shell, which recently posted surprisingly low revenue after some government trouble, was the worst offender) were probably fudged.

Sunday morning, the overnighters (about a dozen guys) analyzed the night over brunch. "There weren't as many girls this time," said Technorati coder Tantek Celik. "There were more," someone replied. "You just didn't notice because they were actually coding."

David Heinemeier Hansson could be mistaken for a Gap model. The Danish 26-year-old's blog is filled with glam photos of himself, his friends at parties, and his hot girlfriend.

The girlfriend's going to love that.

Rails plus 37signals in Wired and BusinessWeek [Loud Thinking by David Hansson]
The Hottest Hacker on Earth [Wired]

The cute thing is CBS's effort to look concerned — bringing in an orthopedic surgeon to remind everyone how unhealthy this is. Because after the news video is a gleefully posted string of eight "extended raw videos" of fights with various weapons. Valleywag's favorite: More Bathroom Implements, a geek Battle Royale with mops, toilet seats, and the least-trained fighters imaginable.

CBS hides the club's location. That's just cruel — can someone ID this place, so I can go get exchange broomstick slaps with an angry young Oracle developer?

Inside The Gentlemen's Fight Club [CBS 5]