My first reaction to programmer punning had been a certain curiosity. The reason for compulsive punning among computer people seemed interesting, ripe for study. Perhaps this would be my ticket to tenure, I thought. My time spent as a “quality-assurance engineer” would not be seen as falling away from academia but as … fieldwork! I would write papers. I would be invited to the next meeting of the Modern Language Association in San Francisco. There I would tell a learned but computer-illiterate audience how programmers had to work in the relentlessly literal language of code, where one slip of a letter reduced everything to incomprehensibility. The compiler, I would tell them, is a computer program that translates the programmer’s code into a set of instructions that can be executed by the microprocessor, the chip at the heart of the machine. The compiler is the entity the programmer must talk to, the creature he or she must make understand the intentions embodied in the code. But this compiler-creature is error-intolerant to a fault; it demands a degree of exactness that is exhausting, painful for an intelligent human being. Leave out a comma, and the compiler halts, affronted at the slightest whiff of error. Fix the comma, run the compiler again, then it halts again, this time at a typo. Puns, I would say, represented a human being’s pent-up need for ambiguity. That a word could signify two things at once! And these double meanings could be simultaneously understood! What a relief from the flat-line understanding of a programmer’s conversation with the machine!