The good news is they're definitely joking. The bad news is that indeed, there's definitely someone out there doing this unironically.

Yes, there is.

A former co-worker had to print 5 lines of text. Sometimes, some of the lines were empty but he didn't want to print an empty line.

So he did the usual, use 'if', a lot of 'if'. He handled all the possible cases of empty VS not empty lines.