The Unhinged Nature of GTA V Source Code [video] | Hacker News Reader

The Unhinged Nature of GTA V Source Code [video]

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64 pointsveqq28 comments

The best comment I ever saw was in a body-corporate-management suite I maintained for a short while.

The comment was at the beginning of a 200 000 line pascal program. It was the only comment in the file.

It advised anyone being approached to maintain it to at least double their quote, as the code used 1 and 2 letter names for variables, constants, functions and procedures. It also advised that the same variables were used for multiple purposes, and that maintaining it was a total nightmare.

The comment was correct. The only variable name that made any sense was l (el, not one), which always held the current line the cursor was on. I was thrilled when I worked out what l (el) did.

-- added clarification due to fonts that make l look like I or 1

Th best code comment story was told by Joe Armstrong " Robert Virding, who developed Erlang with me, was famed for his comment. Singular. The entire stuff he wrote had one comment: in the middle of the pattern-match compiler there was a single line saying ‘and now for the tricky bit".

I want to say it was at Sun in the mid 80s, most code lacked comments but there was one idiosyncratic data structure with field names having specific prefixes - with the comment “She’s Hungarian!” (Hungarian notation, presumably - and who was “she”?)

> and who was “she”?

The structure, probably. In gendered languages objects have a grammatical gender, and "structure" is feminine in at least French, Italian, and Spanish (they all derived from Latin "structura", which is feminine). Non-native English speakers will sometime carry over a noun's gender when writing in English.

Two comments which have stuck in my head for decades

1. “May the fleas of a 1024 camels infest the armpits of anyone who overflows this buffer.”

2. “TODO: this function needs to be spanked.”

3. Someone gone and fucked the sun up

This is great. The comments totally match the language of the NPCs in the GTA game, like as if they're coding their own game.

The video only shows some cursing comments from the source code. Did anybody find any real discussions of the internals of gtav after the leak that are interessting? Any new modding projects?

It was as modded as it could get anyway. A lot of the stuff you'd want to modify is already in Lua as far as I know.

To me, comments, and more specifically the tone of the comments are a reflection of the working environment.

Rockstar North are based in Edinburgh, Scotland. Different places around the world have different cultures around things like swearing at work.

Anybody who has moved from the UK to the US has found this out. Hopefully without HR also finding out.

Wait, you don't swear at work?

Depends on who you're talking to, really: coworkers yes, boss's boss boss, no.

Why the fuck not?

Try it.

I've gotten swatted down even in a small work group with a "let's keep it PG here"

I've sworn in front of a FAANG CTO who was I think 5 or 6 levels above me in the management chain at the time. Nobody batted an eyelid.

Jobs swore.

That text to speech is terrible.

Makes me wonder why there isn't something simple that encrypts and decrypts comments.

Probably because most people assume that private code will remain private.

I would think securing source code is significantly more important than securing comments. So any encryption or protection would cover the entire codebase instead of just the less important parts

whenever i work on a private repo the first thing i do is search the code for curse words to find stuff like this lol

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