A programmer walks into a bar and ask for a drink. The bartender says I'll give you a drink if you tell me a programmer joke. And he says: a programmer walks into a bar and ask for a drink. The bartender says I'll give you a drink if you tell me a programmer joke. And he says: a programmer walks into a bar and ask for a drink. So he gives the guy a drink, so he gives the guy a drink, so he gives the guy a drink.
... (continued): The bartender gives him a puzzled look and says, "I didn't get it", to which the programmer responds "To understand recursion you must first understand recursion."
One day a student came to Moon and said: “I understand how to make a better garbage collector. We must keep a reference count of the pointers to each cons.”
Moon patiently told the student the following story:
“One day a student came to Moon and said: ‘I understand how to make a better garbage collector...
An infinite number of mathematicians walk into a bar. The first one orders a beer. The second one orders half a beer. The third one orders a fourth of a beer. The bartender stops them, pours two beers and says, “You guys should know your limits.”
Is it? In the outer "real world" the bartender will give the programmer a drink for a joke. It could be a knock-knock joke or anything, but the programmer makes it recursive. Thus making the whole thing a joke to us, otherwise it would be a knock-knock joke embedded in a pointless programmer/bartender reference.
In the first joke level, the bartender will give the programmer a drink for a joke; it doesn't work to arbitrarily end here because "a programmer asks the bartender for a drink and the bartender gives him a drink" isn't anything like a joke to qualify at the parent level.
The next level is another layer of recursion and here the programmer can literally ask for a drink and get one even though that isn't funny in itself because it can be funny in the context of the outer joke using "he asked for a drink and got one" as a cheeky way to tell a joke to get a drink, and because it's a reference to recursion, the reason for Chekhov's Programmer in the opening sentence, so making something that qualifies as a joke to get the real world programmer a real world beer.
Seems to me like it's the earliest point it could return and still potentially work, rather than an arbitrary point?
