I heard this one from my father when he had had a few too many beers (my dad is rather funny in general, but even more so when his grip on sobriety loosens up). This won’t be entirely accurate to what he said, but the general gist should be correct:
God and the Devil are having an argument, as they generally do, and decide to duke it out as real men do. As always, God sends in Jesus to do the heavy lifting, and he and the Devil decide on the format of this battle royale:
A programming competition.
Each opponent (Jesus and the Devil) has 24 hours to write the best program ever written in the history of mankind. After 24 hours, they demo what they’ve written, and the winner gets eternal bragging rights as the uber-geek.
So, for the entire day, Jesus and Satan are coding away, downing red bulls and growing out stubble at about the same rate as they ingest coffee. *tap tappity tap tap tap click tap*
As the final hour approaches, the typing gets more and more frenzied as each pounds his keyboard in an effort to make something more exciting, more wonderful, more everything than the other.
With 20 minutes left in the competition, suddenly the power goes out and both machines shut off. Both opponents look up, baffled, but the power soon restarts and both are up and running. In the final 15 minutes, fingers fly faster than any mortal could see, a blur of syntax and semantics that defies all physics.
“TIME!“ Yells God, and both put their hands down.
Satan goes first. He runs his program, but its nothing really exciting. Satan’s anger is great (is it ever not?) as he fumes about the power outage. He smirks, though, as Jesus gets up to show his thing.
When Jesus runs his program, however, it is the most beautiful, elegant, wonderful code ever created. It is, by far, the most amazing thing ever created in the history of programming (probably written in Lisp, too).
Satan, flabbergasted, splutters, “But…how? How did you do it?”
God smiles, looks over at Satan, and casually remarks, “Everybody knows:
Jesus saves.”