Ask HN: Are Funny Code Comments Useful? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Are Funny Code Comments Useful?

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4 pointsnickmolnar8 comments

I am wondering if anyone has worked on an open-source project where people, regularly, included a little humor in their code.

Did this make the project go faster, and development more fun, or was it just distracting?

Funny examples of your own would be appreciated.

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I just found this. Apparently the Linux kernel is primarily written by sailors.

http://www.vidarholen.net/contents/wordcount/

/* WTF IS THIS */ can actually speak volumes about code, though.

Of course they are. Humor is useful. We tracked down a bug in our code the other day to one of the hard-coded internal constants being too high... It had the comment "I sort of just made this up. Probably worth testing." If it had been commentless, we would have worried by moving it we'd fix our use-case but break some other use-case.

I don't think that's an example of humor in comments -- it's just saying, "I'm not sure this is right, you should test it." That's pretty important, actually.

I think the question is more about comments that are just puns or something, like:

  p = point(w, 0, 0);     /* woo hoo! */

What's useful there is not the humor but the information.

Humor is still useful, just less evidently. It helps create a good environment and culture.

I agree entirely, but I have learned that some major airplane manufacturers hold quite the opposite opinion.

I ocasionally find myself writing, "Warning: obscenely hackalicious hackety hack", or something similar. When I come across it later, it makes me laugh and makes me refactor.

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