This is an amalgam of two half-remembered jokes, but I think it works.
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An engineer, physicist, mathematician, and programmer are all hired by a shepherd to create a pen to hold as many sheep as possible with the materials given.
The engineer sets to work immediately building a traditional rectangular fence: a proven design which works. She finishes in an hour.
The physicist pulls out pencil and notepad, and after a few minutes of computation, determines that a novel circular fence design will enclose the maximum number of (spherical, frictionless) sheep, while remaining structurally sound. He too completes the fence within an hour.
The mathematician sits for an hour under a tree in deep thought, suddenly jumps up, wraps herself in a short length of fence, and says, "I declare myself to be outside the fence!" [this is normally where the joke ends]
The programmer meanwhile is nowhere to be found, having run off excitedly with his laptop immediately after hearing the problem statement. The shepherd congratulates the other three on a job well done, and they all part ways.
A week later, as the shepherd is tending to the flock, he is surprised to see the programmer sitting in the shade of a tree, furiously typing away at his laptop. "Uh, how's it coming?" the shepherd asks.
The programmer replies, "It's going great! I've almost finished coding the cross-platform terminal graphics library!"
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An engineer, physicist, mathematician, and programmer are all hired by a shepherd to create a pen to hold as many sheep as possible with the materials given.
The engineer sets to work immediately building a traditional rectangular fence: a proven design which works. She finishes in an hour.
The physicist pulls out pencil and notepad, and after a few minutes of computation, determines that a novel circular fence design will enclose the maximum number of (spherical, frictionless) sheep, while remaining structurally sound. He too completes the fence within an hour.
The mathematician sits for an hour under a tree in deep thought, suddenly jumps up, wraps herself in a short length of fence, and says, "I declare myself to be outside the fence!" [this is normally where the joke ends]
The programmer meanwhile is nowhere to be found, having run off excitedly with his laptop immediately after hearing the problem statement. The shepherd congratulates the other three on a job well done, and they all part ways.
A week later, as the shepherd is tending to the flock, he is surprised to see the programmer sitting in the shade of a tree, furiously typing away at his laptop. "Uh, how's it coming?" the shepherd asks.
The programmer replies, "It's going great! I've almost finished coding the cross-platform terminal graphics library!"