10 kinds of people

Do you remember the old joke:
"There are 10 kinds of people, those who understand binary and those who don't"

It's funny, isn't it. It's sad that it's essentially a written joke, you can't tell it any other way... but wait! THIS MORON THINKS THAT HE CAN: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z7GvstxiH-M

That was a horrible ask a ninja imitation

That joke has always pissed me off. Whoever wrote it clearly has never actually USED binary. Programmers count from an index of 0, not 1. 0x0010 is the index for third kind of people: "Those who aren't just pretending to understand binary."

Also, not clicking the link on principal, but when reading binary numbers out loud, you read right to left through the most significant bit. 0b0010 would read "zero one", not "one zero" and certainly not "ten". I'd bet 10 bucks that he did it wrong. Though that could be what OP meant.

Oops. Wrote 0x0010 the first time. That's too many kinds of people to be funny. :p

>>3
Wat?  Since when was there an established tradition of reading binary from right to left?

>>3
wait is that ten bucks or two bucks? i'm confused.

>>5
Since forever. Think about it for two seconds. If I start reading you a binary number from right to left, you will be able to add up the 1's positions and figure out what number I'm giving you. If I start from the left, you won't know which bit position I'm starting at so you would have to write it down to figure it out.

>>6
That's the joke.

>>7
What if there's a decimal point?  WHAT THEN?

>>7
True, but don't binary/hex numbers usually have a fixed number of digits, as in 32 bit or 64 bit?

>>8
IEEE 754

>>9
In practical usage, yes. 4-, 8-, 16-, 32-, and 64-bit lengths are standard, but so what?

Let's say I'm reading a binary number from left to right: "10100...". You have no idea what that leftmost '1' is worth. It could be worth 16, it could be worth 16,777,216. Depends on how many more bits I read. To fix that, I could preclude every number I read with a total bit count and provide leading zeros, if needed. "32 bits, 18 zeros, 10100". Now you know what the first '1' I said is worth, but that requires some extra mental gymnastics.


If you read from right to left, you know the first bit is worth 1, the second is worth 2, the third is worth 4, etc. Every single time, no extra explanation required, no extra mental gymnastics.

>>8
If there's a DECIMAL point, then you don't have a binary number! :p

Now, if there's a BINARY point (a base2 radix point), you read the whole number from right to left, say "point" or "dot" or "mark" or however is your local custom (I don't think grammar nazi's have gotten THAT specific about this), followed by the fractional number from left to right.

I'm not sure what the problem is with this joke. Of course it won't work out loud, you'd have to either say ten, one zero, or zero one, and any of those would ruin it. In text though, there's nothing wrong with it.