How to improve a day

Friday 26 September 2003

I find, no matter how my day is going, if I can write some code that has the word "shenanigans" in the comments, it's just that little bit better.

tagged: coding, how-to» 7 reactions

Comments

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andrew 8:43 PM on 26 Sep 2003

Don't forget "mishigas"!

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Ben Poole 3:24 AM on 27 Sep 2003

LOL! It is a great word. My current words of choice are:

"Gah!" and,
"convoluted"

They change fairly often.

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Chris 5:11 AM on 27 Sep 2003

reminds me of a comment rumoured to be in the un*x kernel

/* You are not meant to understand this /*

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Bob 12:41 PM on 27 Sep 2003

Best one I've seen is in the Notes source for display of lines in a view:

// Format the column. This is, and always was, the mother of all
// routines. Sorry. (PUSH! PUSH! It's coming! It's... a BOY!)

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Bob 12:51 PM on 27 Sep 2003

Lots of other funny source code comments here:

http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/dmr/odd.html

and

http://discuss.fogcreek.com/joelonsoftware/default.asp?cmd=show&ixPost=3364

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Daniel Axelrod 2:30 PM on 27 Sep 2003

I've written code documented with

"Additional chicanery takes place so that calls to methods inherited from UNIVERSAL are intercepted..."

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Daniel Axelrod 2:42 PM on 27 Sep 2003

The source code for perl (the interpreter/compiler itself) is infamous for some of the comments in it.

double value; /* or your money back! */
short changed;/* so triple your money back! */
-- Larry Wall in cons.c from the perl source code

For more of this, see this collection of Larry Wall quotes:
http://www.cpan.org/misc/lwall-quotes.txt.gz

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