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Comment by ocharles | Hacker News Reader

We might as well extend this to hospitals too! Achievments like "metal detector" for leaving tools inside bodies, or "No your other left" for operating on the wrong leg.

Seriously, this is beyond a dumb idea. Programming is a profession, not a game, and you do not reward malpractice (more than 10 parameters? 30 line Linq statements?) We already have achievements in our industry and it's called a C.V.

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Ray tracer written in more than 30 lines of Linq (using a y combinator), malpractice perhaps but I learned from it.

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/lukeh/archive/2007/10/01/taking-linq...

While perhaps the list was heavy on dubious "achievements", there's nothing wrong with trying to have fun with your work. Obviously more achievements for positive things would be good, but as was mentioned elsewhere in this thread, "achievements" for negative actions could have a good teaching effect.

Up-voted because I sort of agree: although it's fun to see achievements pop up, and some of these are comical ("I’m Sorry – Created a new Visual Basic Project") some others might encourage bad practices ("The Mathematician – Defined 15 local variables with a single character name"). I mean if they were just in the periphery, that's cute. But if people actually try to "achieve" these achievements, as they do in Steam games, I have a feeling that company might quickly decide to remove such functionality from their VS.

Just my 2¢

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