11 thoughts on “Great Moments In Coding”

1. The hipster slang is yet another obscure algorithm description language?

   Now, get off my lawn!

   1. Hmm. I’d like to see how “no cap, sus, fr & thicc” are graphically represented as in Backus-Naur.

      1. I guess I’m actually thinking Syntax Diagrams no cap, fr fr.

2. Comment my code? Why do you think we call it “code?”

3. Decades ago, when real programmers only wrote assembly language, there was a series of conditional branches in one of IBM’s operating systems. The comments:

   illegal?
   immoral?
   must be fattening

   1. My favorite self-authored assembly code comment, when bit twiddling a clock line: “These NOPs guarantee a 50% duty cycle on the clock.” It never occurred to me to say it was “bussin and un-bussin the clock line totally fair, fr fr no cap!”

4. I used comment lines for jokes and snark and had systematically vulgar variable names. To this day, I get emails from people reverse engineering my old stuff. Especially error trap nomenclature with as many variants of the f-word as I could think of (and I am an imaginatively naughty boy).

5. A lesson I learned from co-workers who learned the hard way– always code and use test data that you would find acceptable should it be seen by the public and/or top level management. ’cause at some point, some moron in Config Management is going to do a Debug build instead of Release, and then “ship it.”

   Unless, of course, you are deliberately obfuscating the code (“security by obscurity”). Then you can claim that you are just making it a little bit harder for hackers to figure out what’s going on. (And get questions from QA like, “Why is upYours() never called from eatShitAndDie() in the new build?”)

   1. Indeed.

      The standard that you uphold is called professionalism.

6. The fast inverse square root function in Quake 3 includes comments like “evil floating point bit level hacking” and “what the f?”.

   1. Huge fan of “evil floating point bit level hacking”, including order of operation hacks when error propagation on a truncated Chebyshev polynomial makes addition non-commutative. Oh yeah, it happens….

Comments are closed.