Comment by coxley

Comment by coxley 14 hours ago

6 replies

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For many years at FB, suffixing dangerous or really-deprecated tokens with `_DO_NOT_USE_OR_YOU_WILL_BE_FIRED` was the standard. Everyone[^1] was in on the joke.

In the middle of the pandemic when ~50% of the workforce had started post-2020, it and other things became complaints for causing fear/uncertainty. We didn't do the best job on-boarding remote people and making them feel part of the culture at that time.

[^1]: It was a big company so this statement could only be true in the circles I had access to.

otras 12 hours ago

I remember seeing this in React's __SECRET_INTERNALS_DO_NOT_USE_OR_YOU_WILL_BE_FIRED, and I've always enjoyed similar lighthearted and unwieldingly-long names.

Unfortunately I see it too has fallen victim to defunnification: https://github.com/facebook/react/pull/28789

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  • furyofantares 5 hours ago

    Could have added a futurama reference to it

    __SECRET_INTERNALS_DO_NOT_USE_OR_YOU_WILL_BE_FIRED_______OUT_OF_A_CANNON___INTO_THE_SUN

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  • shkkmo 11 hours ago

    Fun names are OK, but only if they don't introduce ambiguity. In this case the change wasn't so much anti-fun as anti-ambiguity.

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    • otras 11 hours ago

      That's a great call-out, and it (along with the change itself) underlines the importance of not letting fun get in the way of actual engineering improvements. Defunnification as a side effect, if you will.

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beder 6 hours ago

At one point at Google, there was a huge chunk of code that was hard to understand, probably at the wrong place in the network stack, and stubbornly hard to change. And it kept growing, despite our efforts. We renamed it "[Foo]Sorcery" (this was about 10 years ago); people stopped trying to add to it, and periodically someone would come in and remove parts of it, all thanks (I think) to the goofy (and somewhat scary) name.

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