magospietato 18 hours ago

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.

  • tikhonj 17 hours ago

    But a wholly non-funny "Invariant Violated" message would be no better. The problem isn't that the message is funny, but that it does not contain the information you need to understand what's going on. The whimsy is just a distraction.

    • eptcyka 16 hours ago

      Do you find that distracting things help you debug shoddy code?

      • tikhonj 15 hours ago

        They don't hurt, and it's fun to come across them. If the funny thing is used in one place, it can be memorable and easier to search for. If it's the equivalent of "error [error]" or whatever, I honestly don't care.

      • arccy 15 hours ago

        if "divide by cucumber" is a unique string in the code base, then yes?

  • dotancohen 15 hours ago

    "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.

aaronbrethorst 7 hours ago

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.

wiseowise 16 hours ago

Who cares what happens after you’ve passed away. You’re dead.

  • Scarblac 15 hours ago

    Only the things that remain of you after death really matter, everything else will have gone completely then anyway.

    • wiseowise 15 hours ago

      No, even those don’t matter. You’re dead.

      • ahartmetz 14 hours ago

        There are other people in the world.

        Similar to not caring at all about the rest of society when you're alive, not caring at all about the rest of society when you're dead makes for a shitty society. You are not the world, there is an external reality (with people in it!), and you have obligations to it. I'm not a religious person, but it seems to me that religion helps or used to help with such things.

      • AnimalMuppet 10 hours ago

        To me, now alive, those things that will endure after I die matter to me now, because they will endure after I die.

  • reaperducer 14 hours ago

    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?