Comment by aaronbrethorst
Comment by aaronbrethorst 17 hours ago
Good, I hate ‘funny’ code. Just get to the point, I’m not here for someone’s notionally hilarious inside joke from 18 years ago.
Comment by aaronbrethorst 17 hours ago
Good, I hate ‘funny’ code. Just get to the point, I’m not here for someone’s notionally hilarious inside joke from 18 years ago.
I think that's a big line between people who work as software engineers becuase they enjoy the work and want to build something and folks who go there to punch the ticket and run back home as soon as possible.
The second group doesn't want to deal with "all the fun crap" and "distractions" that stand in the way of them marking a bug fixed (or, god forbid, actually getting extra bugs/work assigned because some "fun" code might break or cause confusion).
As teams and companies grow, the second group usually outgrows the first and the first group moves on to reform into smaller teams working on something else again.
I have had my share of fun things I added to code/environment. Yet then we add 'the new guy'. They spend a long time arguing why that humor should not be there. One project it was a single line comment about new beginnings on the main procedure. That created a 2 hour rant about how unprofessional it was and months of unwarranted verbal abuse. It was literally the only piece of humor in the entire codebase. Super petty. Turned a fun functioning team into a slog of even wanting to go into work and all the rest of team reassigning themselves to other work. I use it as a litmus test these days of what I want to work with. Kind of tempted to add it to interview questions but have not found a proper way to do it.
Better to reassign 'the new guy', rather than let him destroy the team.
Exactly. However, that would mean the boss thought the same, as he was hired specifically for that team. By the time it had happened the boss had not even noticed. Despite the team basically telling him every day in 50 different nice ways. In this case I did not realize it was controlling and manipulative behavior. But I learned and can spot it off pretty quickly now and will make sure it does not happen again.
Things that seem fun when they are written are often not much so a few years later, without the initial context, when trying to actually "build something".
Fun is good when it is fresh. Fossilized fun is not that fun. It is more like that uncle who heavily tries to be fun at family parties.
Google is not fun and people that try to be funny from Google are cringe
I agree with you. The dinosaur game in Chrome is the classic example; turned off because schools threatened to not buy Chromebooks if kids could play a game in the browser. At least it seems to be a setting now, so your individual locality can decide if fun is allowed.
That’s quite different from what we’re talking about though. That’s adding games or fun into your product whereas in this specific sub-thread we’re talking about naming code concepts (functions, classes, variables, enums, etc) funny things.
I don't mind either personally, but I've had a few occasions where such things have caused issues with engineers that didn't have English as a 1st language.
A fair bit of time was wasted on trying to understand some joke/pun code and variable names, and on another occasion, spending the best part of a day working on something because they took some sarcasm in code/comments literally.
I couldn’t agree more. I work in a codebase that has a handful of these “fun”-named functions/concepts and I hate it. It wasn’t funny the first time I came across it (just very confusing) and it’s not fun having to explain to new hires why a few things are named the way they are.
It needlessly complicates reading/following the code. Even if you explain the naming back at where you define the function/variable it add an extra click-through/hover to read that and an extra translation you have to do in your head when you read the “fun” variable name in the future.
One example is we have a flag called “dinnerbell”. What does that do? It tells the server receiving that flag to “come and get it”, “it” being the full data object instead of just getting a delta. It could have been called a whole slew of other things that would make more sense.
Live a little. When you've passed away, was all the seriousness paid off?
That said, funny code should still work
There's a middle ground for sure. I've left a few witty comments and loglines in my time.
But I've also had to debug a Delphi unit which returned error codes inspired by the magical supercomputer Hex from the Discworld novels.
"Divide by cucumber error" is not a decent enough representation of a module's internal state, no matter how funny you think you are.
"Divide by cucumber error" sounds like a great string to grep for - so actually helpful for developers to find the place in the code that threw it.
Not having to understand someone's goofy inside joke gives me more time to spend on the things that matter the most to me. So: less funny code == living a little more.
Who cares what happens after you’ve passed away.
Every single person who isn't you.
You are aware there are other people besides you, right?
I remember when the Steam "login from a new computer" auth flow shoved a big "Hi there!" in user's faces the moment it blocked access to their entire online functionality until they left to get a code from their email and came back. Sometime later they removed it and now it's just "please look for the confirmation code sent to <address>".
I think in the push to make computing "friendlier" by dressing up error messages, past a certain point they began to come off as condescending. I wish modern UX could focus on working for me instead of trying to be my friend all the time.
Ah I see you're one of those who would enable `UserManager.DISALLOW_FUN`!
I personally quite enjoy a bit of whimsy in code. What we do (mostly) isn't that serious (modulo those, including me once upon a time, who work on literal life and death software)