Programmer Humor

// Prints "Hello World!" to the screen
printf("Hello World!");

Why the fuck would I do this? This is nonsense. This way is way better.

*half an hour later, when I run into a major, strangely familiar bug*

Ooooohhhh!

I forget which extension it is but the thing that shows a faint git blame at the end of the line under cursor in VS Code has been… humbling.

A friend of mine used to teach coding decades ago and one story I'll never forget is about the student who had an assignment that asked for a "for" loop to be used, but they didn't quite know how to use it so they just wrote a broken loop there and then hid a "while" loop at the far end of the line.

Code compiled, had a "for" loop and had the right output.

AI mostly learned it from programming tutorials and things like documentation and Q&A forums like StackOverflow. People often add comments in those cases to explain to somebody not familiar with code what is happening so they can learn from it.

In actual code written by people who write code for a living I'd hope the comments are much more useful and usually not as prevalent.

// 🤦 You are totally right! Simply logging the 🚨 error to the console isn't proper error handling. 🫣 We now throw an exception instead. throw new ApplicationException(error);

I once tried vibe coding a web app using GitHub Copilot. That motherfucker wrapped every single endpoint with

try:
    ...
except Exception:
    return "An error occurred"

What the fuck is wrong with you Copilot? This piece of shit trying to hide all the errors. If I don't know there are errors then there aren't errors. Apparently

Proper comments describe why... For example say you are using an api which requires guids and your application doesn't care are collisions as much so just use int id's.

You could add in a comment like

// creating a guid to interface with special api.

But just saying

// generate guid

Means nothing, your method should be generate_guid() or GenerateGuid(). Your comment is repeating.

Or this is probably going to hit my last company at some point, there was a system to read a serial number. They also wanted a "status" on the screen to verify the system was connected and running properly but both these values came over same signal wire. Depending on your exact ms timing sometimes you would read the status as the serial number. Another programmer wrote a check to verify the serial number did not start with OK. The comment added was

// add on 11/15/23 by Initials

With no other details. The serial numbers were 8 numeric digits. Someone won't know the history and delete this seemingly useless check and cause a 10s of 1000s of dollars in loss

Nope, sorry. I just break my code into neatly grouped chunks, and I'm very consistent

I regularly go "I need something to do X", and when I go to write it it's already there. It does exactly what I need it to do, otherwise why would I name it X and not X_for_situation_y? I would never

My utility functions are reusable, my classes handle their own logic internally, and so my business logic is clean and readable. My code flows straight and clear, along a single path whenever possible

So yeah... When I start working with people, there's the initial confusion then this moment where they go "Oh! That's really easy to understand"

Every time.