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Many years ago my team was working with an inherited system based on FoxPro. The original designer had used abbreviated table names like ASS instead of Assignment. A normally straight laced co-worker bust out laughing one day when he had to write a SQL statement "INSERT INTO ASS ..."
Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend; inside of a dog, it's too dark to read. -- Groucho Marx
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In a similar tone...
Many years ago, we had a small network of Sun machines. The machine names followed the names of the planets in our solar system. The QA guy (who was a 1st-order asshat) was incensed when he was given the machine named... wait for it... you know it's coming...
Uranus.
Software Zen: delete this;
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My favorite was when I was in printing, there was an old Sun Systems network printing interface that, when shutting down, declared "Killing the orbix daemon."
I loved that line so much, I stole it and built a D&D adventure around it.
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Years ago I implemented a message dispatch function name WhoCares(). It stuck around that way until a coworker added a popup dialog box to it that displayed a tracing message usually written to a log file.
At some point that popup appeared and the customer service folks had kittens over it. Apparently they read it as "we don't care about this", when in reality the WhoCares() function was deciding which routine to pass the message on to, you know "who cares about processing this, I'll pass it on to them". Anyway, the customer service folks didn't have a sense of humor about it and I was forced to change it's name to the innocuous "EventProcessor".
To this day I still refer to it as "WhoCares".
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In a CRM I worked on, had a method that cleaned up sales records,securities and associations for reps, I look at it quite fondly on a regular basis.
KillRep(x)
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my hubby used to work helldesk in college and he said he kept a paperclip around for rebooting the imacs and an icepick around for rebooting their users.
When I was growin' up, I was the smartest kid I knew. Maybe that was just because I didn't know that many kids. All I know is now I feel the opposite.
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honey the codewitch wrote: an icepick around for rebooting their users
Software Zen: delete this;
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honey the codewitch wrote: icepick around for rebooting their users
Is that what they call a LART in your part of the world?
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
-- 6079 Smith W.
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something like that, yes.
When I was growin' up, I was the smartest kid I knew. Maybe that was just because I didn't know that many kids. All I know is now I feel the opposite.
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honey the codewitch wrote: my hubby used to work helldesk in college and he said he kept a paperclip around for rebooting the imacs and an icepick around for rebooting their users.
Too bad I can't use that technique.
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Gary Wheeler wrote: _Users_Terminate();
just don't let Sander catch you writing leading underscores in your method names.
When I was growin' up, I was the smartest kid I knew. Maybe that was just because I didn't know that many kids. All I know is now I feel the opposite.
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honey the codewitch wrote: writing leading underscores in your method names I'm doing it consistently(*), as is the rest of my group, so it is therefore unassailably correct.
(*) Our convention is that non-public values are named with a leading underscore.
Software Zen: delete this;
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You have my blessings on the underscore
But why is there a comment that just puts the two words of the function name in a different order?
Why not change the function name to _Terminate_Users (or TerminateUsers if you want to do it right ) so it's slightly more readable and ditch the comment?
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Sander Rossel wrote: Why not change the function name to _Terminate_Users (or TerminateUsers if you want to do it right ) That was last month. The coding standard of this month says that functions should be named _<class>_<action>. The argument for that is that in a sorted list of function names, you get all the actions on one object class gathered together.
I have no information wha will be the right way to format code next month, or what the arguments will be, but I am really happy that modern IDEs have support for coding style changes. For newlines, indents and spacing it can be fully automated. Changing naming standards usually require some more manual work, but compared to the old days where you had to manually search for every occurence of a symbol to change it to the standard of the month required a lot more work.
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Fortunately for me, our coding standard (all 1½ pages of it) hasn't changed significantly since 2000.
Software Zen: delete this;
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The comment was removed shortly thereafter. The "user termination" logic was directly after the comment, but was moved into its own method. This was part of a reorganization/refactoring going on in preparation for a new feature.
Software Zen: delete this;
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The best comment is a removed comment
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A long time ago I took a programming class from Dan Saks, one-time secretary of the ISO C++ standardization committee. He said something to us which has stuck with me ever since, and has led to a profound reduction in the number of comments I write:
"If you can, say it in code. If you can't, only then say it in a comment."
While we do maintain change history in our source, my comments now tend to serve other purposes than simple documentation. For example, our code base is in the neighborhood of 3 million lines so navigation can be a problem. Comments can serve as markers for 'find in files' destinations when Intellisense doesn't work.
Software Zen: delete this;
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One of my mentors once stated
"The comments are the part of the code that even the compiler cannot understand"
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I do similar. Private members have leading underscores in my code.
I was just yanking Sander's chain.
When I was growin' up, I was the smartest kid I knew. Maybe that was just because I didn't know that many kids. All I know is now I feel the opposite.
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honey the codewitch wrote: yanking Sander's chain Chain-yanking is almost always a useful thing.
Software Zen: delete this;
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I find the comment more problematic.
But it's good that I instill fear in those that write code of dubious quality*
* The quality of code shall be measured by braceless single line if statements, indentation, lack or abundance of white space, naming conventions and comments.
Whether the code does what it should do is of secondary concern.
Code written in Java shall be considered bad quality by default.
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see, I used to care about that stuff.
now it's (re other people's code)
a) does the code do what it's supposed to?
b) can i read it?
i guess i've gotten good at b because i'm fine with just about whatever.
When I was growin' up, I was the smartest kid I knew. Maybe that was just because I didn't know that many kids. All I know is now I feel the opposite.
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Technically is just a line of code.
-- Carlo The Nitpick
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Software Zen: delete this;
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