DevExpress Newsletter 20: Message from the CTO

The sample data sure sounds familiar. In a home building management system (that used DX!) we had sample data that as a joke for one of the community names, we, the developers, had entered 'Morning Wood Farms." It was caught during a presentation and quickly minimized, but for one brief moment, there it was, in all its glory for our would-be customer to see. Oops.

When I encountered 'public void HaraKiri() ' I had to smile though.

Early in my career, I entered a cvs commit with the comment, "I'm doing this the wrong way only because the moron in charge doesn't know how to program". Well, you can guess who reviewed the cvs commits every night...

I have written smart-ass comments in the hopes that someday somebody else actually would read them.

I teach part-time for University of Phoenix Online, and when the subject of comments came up in my last class, I told them not to take my word for what I do, look at my production code... do view->source on my site and see if there are comments on the JS.

Then one replied with a smiley face and asked if I always write comments as if I were in a conversation with another person?

Well... yeah I guess depending upon how late at night I'm coding :)

You must have covered your tracks in the TP code; after all these years still haven't found any "easter eggs". lol

LOL! At one company I worked for, we had a mascot for our bug catching component... The Stay Pufft Marshmallow man... It didn't go out to production, but there was a member of the team it resembled (He was huge!) and he never got it lol...

So my "bm" variable for BindingManagerBase should be changed?  

I recall many years ago doing a demo for a lady customer, I did not have time to grab the sample company so I used one of my co-worker's datasets.

When "Edible Panties" came up on the product list, I was not sure if we would still make the sale!  Funny now though!

Once I posted a comment in a developer newsgroup about the company website and asked that its poor quality not be used as a gauge to determine our real company quality because the president had made the page with front page.   The president had some google alert or something for the company name.  A few days later he came to my office and said he had seen my comment.  He thought it was funny but I was embarrassed.

I was lucky enough to learn this lesson in college!

My CS courses (Arts & Sciences school) let us informally compete with shocking names in test data.  When I went to the Business school (for more specific application of my skills) I quickly found they did not have such a competition!  And, sure enough, some original test data (that I THOUGHT I had deleted) appeared during a presentation.  :-(

Hilarious! Over time I have many well-hidden remarks in code, and enjoy the coder's humor.

Your advice is long over due. It has been nearly 20 years since I first encountered the MickeyMousePointer in some VM Pascal code.

Hi Julian,

Good advice on the comments. Professional coders should produce professional code. Full stop.

On a completely unrelated note, any chance we'll get 3D surface charts this year? I (and probably a lot of people in finance) am itching to stop paying your competitors for one single chart component that DevExpress lacks.

There's another angle to consider, of course...

If, through some grand catastrophy, my test data ever does leak into production, I don't want anyone to *act* on that data. Instead, I want the test data to be *recognised* as bogus data and reported through the appropriate help channels.

It is possible to create test data that is obviously bogus to a human while looking sufficiently like the real thing for the system to process it. Being outrageous or offensive isn't required.

Just good coding practice - profanity and poor taste humour in comments and documentation is bad engineering (and usually quite embarrasing in code review). It's also a sign you're not concentrating on the task at hand - you're making up jokes instead.

Having said that, I'd say that test data needs to be fairly silly (within the bounds of good taste of course). If it isnt, it can be mistaken for real data, which could be disastrous. Case in point: most medical surgeries have a test patient somewhere on their systems, for testing,  training, bug reporting and so on. If that test patient is confused with a real patient, the resulting misdiagnosis could harm someone.

We always called our test patient Scooby-doo. He was on so many pills he rattled.

In an accounting software company years ago, one of our developers put the following line in as an amusing error for the testers to find: 'Your data is f$%ked' (although the second and third letter were 'uc' .

Somehow it got missed and went into production and one of the customers rang up crying, saying his data was f$%ked'

I LOVE reading comments in code with all that wonderful, entertaining goodness. As long as the code gets done well, I really don't care much. Here are a few links to entertain:

codeulate.com/.../fcking-programming

www.vidarholen.net/.../wordcount

And for lots more:

www.google.com/codesearch***&btnG=Search+Code

As for the whole "professional" thing... BALDERDASH!

I've seen more "professionals" that write the most horrid garbage and don't know their @$$ from a memory leak, all the while maintaining some nonsense, haughty air of "professionalism".

Who cares about the odd f**k, d*mn, sh*t or p*ss? The point to being a professional is COMPETENCE, and not some BS politeness to disguise incompetence.

There's a difference between using profanity and being obscene or offensive. I'd rather read profanity that expresses the frustration of the developer and points out something useful, than roses, rainbows and unicorns that don't add any useful information.

Similarly, there's no need to be offensive or to insult or deride people in comments.

// This is a f**ing sh*tty hack. It needs to be fixed.

vs.

// The boss told me to write this f**king nonsense. Blame that jack@$$ when it doesn't work.

The first expresses frustration, which is perfectly acceptable for humans. The second expresses contempt, which just isn't acceptable in the work place. They are 2 totally different issues. The first does not diminish the work. The second does.

Swear away, but be competent and respectful.

I got picked up on a loop stress test once. Thought it completely harmless, but it gives you an idea just how uptight some people can be:

for i = 1 to 1000

for j = 1 to 1000

proc

'wheeeeeeeee

next

next

Who'd have thought "wheeeeee" would offend?

We once had to decide on a sysadmin account that didnt say sysadmin, and the head of IT had put forward TheFatController  - taken from a kids program about speaking trains.  This kind of stuck with me and I used it when I had started a new job.  I was then asked to pass on the account details to a director who I had never met who was going to have some hands on.  Queue me walking into the office to pass over the details and seeing a guy sitting there about 24 stones....  Eventually said I had forgotten to bring the account details.

Well, thanks for the tip, funny stuff. Being a young programmer myself, I'll keep this in mind when I'm writing the code for my latest project - a little something for my school.