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Comment by giancarlostoro | Hacker News Reader

Reminds me of a former employer who maintained a custom solution on top of a GPLd piece, customer finally asked for a copy of the source, so someone went through looking for swear words and anything offensive to remove. I never understood commenting offensive things or calling variables by terrible names.

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People who swear when they're hurt feel less pain than those who don't. Swearers were able to keep their hands in the 5 degree C. water longer than non-swearers.

https://blogs.illinois.edu/view/25/6843

Sure, but I don't check it into my codebase.

I have added a few. The last one starts with CTHUlHU FHTAGN for a godforsaken piece of shit software which I try to automate for e2e testing. Cannot use docker, because that thing has workflows where I need to click the UI. Also, the workflow is terribly unintuitive and convuluted. The packet script therefore has three breakpoints where I have to log in to the VM and click stuff

> I never understood commenting offensive things or calling variables by terrible names.

Maybe because of this? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36584464

That's a Hacker News post of a reposting of another blog post about a bachelor thesis. Not sure what all the indirection adds.

Because it's 4 fucking am the day before the god-damned code freeze deadline and i just need to get this shit to work and the gently caressing thing keeps breaking.

Gamedev used to be a far different culture. Code that would get thrown away after release, short deadlines, gremlin bugs in code written in a convoluted way to eke or another few fps, tons of ill-architected systems interacting with each other in unforseen ways. To quote the kids these days, some of the comments hit me right in those feels.

Sure, I used to swear like a sailor, hell, I would offend people who swore all day, they'd ask me to stop swearing so much, yet I never felt the urge to put it into my code.

I remember the hubbub over Duke Nukem 3D when people found out that the dancers in the club (I think it was them) were referenced internally as "bitches".

Some people are just immature.

I think some people take craftsmanship more seriously than others, and wouldn’t deface a workpiece like that during those moments of frustration that we all have.

I find that PRs are the best place for rants. I can let out steam while sharing and recording my journey and lessons learned, while not making the code worse off with silly variable names and sloppy comments.

I have once added a comment saying “this was a very painful function to get right. If you change it you will suffer the same fate. See PR#1234 for details.”

You could also argue that witty comments in code could also indicate a more artisan style of craftsmanship with deep care of the code. I'm not talking about insults but more about specific context provided in a felt prose, like I've seen in legacy code.

Not usually my style but I wouldn't judge it as "not talking it seriously".

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